Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/564

522 incoordination, is merely a question of degree, and it will frequently be difficult to assign any given concrete case to either the one class or the other.

So much for the logical analysis of the hypothesis we are considering and its implications. If we turn now to the facts and try to apply these principles to them we shall find, I think, that many phenomena for which our current psychology can not give any explanation, become, if not entirely intelligible, at least more comprehensible than they were.

A familiar form of disordination is found in states of which sleep may be regarded as the type. Perfect sleep is not a disordinated state. In perfect sleep we must suppose that all mental life is absolutely quenched; not even isolated states remain. But most sleep is not perfect, and it is probable that some cortical activity persists throughout. When we would go to sleep we withdraw ourselves as much as possible from the storm of stimuli that is always assailing our sense-organs, thus cutting off all vivid sensations with their complex and far-reaching associations. Little by little the activities that remain—i. e., those that lie at the foundation of our ideational life—become quiescent. Then the laggards among them, freed from their usual restraints, assume distorted forms. Isolated scenes, dislocated scraps of sentences, vague thoughts, flit through the mind's rapidly emptying chambers, coalescing and combining with one another in fashions grotesque and unpredictable; from moment to moment they become fewer, and then—oblivion. Sometimes on awaking we remember strange experiences had in sleep—what we term dreams. What are they but dislocated systems of mental elements, sometimes springing out of elements which have persisted through the period of disruption, as when we dream of things with which our thoughts have been busied through the day, sometimes springing out of sensations occasioned by stimuli falling upon our sense-organs. Yet in every case dreams are developed under associative laws analogous to those of waking life, although very different in the details of their operation. Take the case M. Maury reports. He got a friend to tickle his face with a feather while he was asleep, and dreamed that he was being tortured by having a mask of pitch applied to his face and then torn forcibly away, taking with it the skin and flesh. Had he been awake, the stimulus would have caused a sensation of tickling; by associative reasoning he would have instantly divined its cause, and would have thought of the movements suitable to stop it. In sleep the sensation developed far more than it would have done in waking life, and was therefore magnified into an intense tearing sensation, and for this magnified state by similar associative reasoning a suitable cause was found. Had he been awake, even if