ence of the every night dream that we are
unconscious of our actual surroundings and conscious of a fantastic
environment. It is the essence of wideawakeness to be conscious of our
actual surroundings. In the ordinary dream, nothing actual competes with
its visions. When we are conscious of our surroundings, everything actual
does compete with any hallucination. Therefore, an hallucination which,
when we are conscious of our material environment, does compete with it in
reality, is different _in kind_ from an ordinary dream. Science gains
nothing by arbitrarily declaring that two experiences so radically
different are identical. Anybody would see this if he were not arguing
under a dominant idea.

Herr Parish next contends that people who see pictures in crystal balls,
and so on, are not so wide awake as to be in their normal consciousness.
There is 'dissociation' (practically drowsiness), even if only a
little. Herr Moll also speaks of crystal-gazing pictures as 'hypnotic
phenomena.'[12] Possibly neither of these learned men has ever seen a
person attempt crystal-gazing. Herr Parish never asserts any such personal
experience as the basis of his opinion about the non-normal state of the
gazer. He reaches this conclusion from an anecdote reported, as a not
unfamiliar phenomenon, by a friend of Miss X. But the phenomenon occurred
when Miss X. was not crystal-gazing at all! She was looking out of a
window in a brown study. This is a noble example of logic. Some one says
that Miss X. was not in her normal consciousness on a certain occasion
when she was _not_ crystal-gazing, and that this condition is familiar to
the observer. Therefore, argues Herr Parish, nobody is in his normal
consciousness when he is crystal-gazing.

In vain may 'so good an observer as Miss X. think herself fully awake' (as
she does think herself) when crystal-gazing, because once, when she
happened to have 'her eyes _fixed on the window_,' her expression was
'_associated_' by a friend 'with _something uncanny_,' and she afterwards
spoke '_in a dreamy, far-away tone_' (p. 297). Miss X., though extremely
'wide awake,' may have looked dreamily at a window, and may have seen
mountains and marvels. But the point is that she was not voluntarily
gazing at a crystal for amusement or experiment--perhaps trying to see how
a microscope affected the pictures--or to divert a friend.

I appeal to the shades of Aristotle and Bacon against scientific logic in
the h