Page:Weird Tales Volume 9 Number 1 (1927-01).djvu/109

 doctors of medicine are devoting half their time to the diagnosis of illness through the interpretation of dreams. I have taken the experiment a step farther. Realizing the importance of dreams and the dream function, I have endeavored to control them. Now I knew to begin with that dreams are ofttimes the product of suggestion. I took this as a starting point and annexed it to a fact which is also quite well-known by psychologists. It is quite easy to implant into a person's mind, either the conscious or subconscious, a suggestion which the subject is desirous of absorbing. The third fact which I made use of was that when the will of the suggester is stronger than that of the subject, the problem of implanting the desired dream is almost trifling. When I met you, you were bored to death, in the grip of melancholia. Therefore you were an excellent subject for experiment. The only rift in the lute was this: if you had never met my daughter by chance as you walked through Washington Square, I knew I should fail in my attempt. Understand, I merely mean that I had to assume that you two had passed each other. If you had not seen her face once at least, I knew that I could not have infused her presence into your dreams. Some day what I have done will be as simple as hypnotism is at present. Hypnotism is the science of controlling a person's will. You can appreciate that the control of dreams is not a much greater step forward.

"The pipe which you smoked contained nothing but scented tobacco. It had no power to provoke even the faintest glimmer of a dream. I used it because by so doing I could more readily and quickly get control over your consciousness. Having once gotten control of your conscious mind, the task of gaining control of your subconscious mind was simplified greatly.' You believed that the pipe contained the stuff that dreams are made of, and when you had once absorbed the suggestion, auto-suggestion helped me materially to implant the ensuing dreams. Physicians are well aware of the phenomenon which I have mentioned. Were a doctor to suggest to a patient that he were dying, even though the statement were groundless, the chances are ten to one the patient would die. A case in point was reported in the newspapers recently. A man in England decided to commit suicide. He locked himself in a small room, sealed up all the cracks in the doors with newspapers and then turned on the gas-jets. Unknown to him the gas in the house had been turned off that day to permit the company to fix the mains in the street. But he imagined that the gas was pouring into the room and so he died from heart-failure, one of the most peculiar cases of suicide ever recorded

"At first it had been my intention to permit you to believe that the girl existed in your dream only. I had no idea of ever making known her actual existence. This subsequent development was the natural result of your attitude toward the dream. Psychoanalysts now know that a man dreams constantly when he is sleeping, but that due to the careful guarding of the Gateway to the Unconscious by what Freud has termed the 'censor' we seldom remember our dreams. There are many proofs that this is so, as for instance when one is awakened suddenly in the middle of the night, it often happens that one is conscious of a nameless fear as if an unknown presence or horror is in the room. At the same time one doesn't remember having dreamed a thing. The dream is forgotten, but the fear gets by the 'censor.' I am not going to bore you with unnecessary detail, but you can verify my assertions very easily by referring to Fielding, Barbara Low, Tridon, or any of the