Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/504

498 the transitional stages from sleep to wakefulness, in which partial adjustment to the real environment, partial domination of the dreamy unadjusted or inwardly absorbed consciousness is in control. In such a condition a night operator at a small railway station, who was rarely called between midnight and four o'clock and frequently slept during parts of these hours, though always awakening to the combination of clicks that formed his personal summons, dozed off at midnight, and was awakened an hour later by the appearance of a conductor of a special train that had arrived without awakening him. The latter at once asked him for his train orders. The signal was displayed preventing any train from passing the station without stopping for orders; on the desk at the operating key was an order in his own handwriting, which was verified and found to be correct. With only the feeblest recollection thereof, the drowsy or sleeping operator had interpreted and recorded accurately his telegraphic duties. It is doubtless more likely that in such a half-awake condition the wrong response would be made, such as that of an operator under similar conditions who, suddenly aroused, went to an automatic vending-machine and tried to call up the despatcher by manipulating it. The half-awake, half-oriented consciousness is typically not critical, is satisfied with partial resemblances, and is suggestible; it occupies the middle ground between the lapses arising from a temporarily sleeping orientation and the more serious disturbances sequent to more fundamental lesions of consciousness.

We have now to observe that the apperceptive recognition takes place on the basis of the preparedness, the qualification to interpret, that is the expression of previous experience, dominant habits, customary modes of absorption; and that much of this preliminary setting or tuning of the mental instrument goes on subconsciously. We have found a rather effective formula for certain groups of lapses in positing that two trains of ideas cross, or intermingle, or get their respective components interchanged. Now, if one of these is the more attentive reaction to what is objectively presented, and the other what is less reflectively supplied from the subconscious preparatory mechanism, our formula could be extended to a further range of elaborative processes. A graduate of the University of Michigan, upon coming to Wisconsin, found himself for some time reading the posters announcing football and other events as referring to Michigan, the initial W being inattentively interpreted as an M, and the rest following from the inner expectation. Expectant attention, itself largely subconscious, enters to modify perception and to prepare the way for more and more startling illusions and misinterpretations. Similarly in regard to associations: A., hearing the