-natured voice,
noticed the play of his smile, your conscious mind was occupied by the
idea of cheerfulness. This idea on being transferred to the
Unconscious became a reality, so that without any logical grounds you
became cheerful.

Few people, especially young people, are unacquainted with the effects
produced by hearing or reading ghost-stories. You have spent the
evening, let us say, at a friend's house, listening to terrifying tales
of apparitions. At a late hour you leave the fireside circle to make
your way home. The states of fear imaged before your mind have
realised themselves in your Unconscious. You tread gingerly in the
dark places, hurry past the churchyard and feel a distinct relief when
the lights of home come into view. It is the old road you have so
often traversed with perfect equanimity, but its cheerful associations
are overlooked and the commonest objects tinged with the colour of your
subjective states. Autosuggestion cannot change a post into a spectre,
but if you are very impressionable it will so distort your sensory
impressions that common sounds seem charged with supernatural
significance and every-day objects take on terrifying shapes.

In each of the above examples the idea of a mental state--cheerfulness
or fear--was presented to the mind. The idea on reaching the
Unconscious became a reality; that is to say, you actually became
cheerful or frightened.

The same process is much easier to recognise where the resultant is not
a mental but a bodily state.

One often meets people who take a delight in describing with a wealth
of detail the disorders with which they or their friends are afflicted.
A sensitive person is condemned by social usage to listen to a
harrowing account of some grave malady. As detail succeeds detail the
listener feels a chilly discomfort stealing over him. He turns pale,
breaks into a cold perspiration, and is aware of an unpleasant
sensation at the pit of the stomach. Sometimes, generally where the
listener is a child, actual vomiting or a fainting fit may ensue.
These effects are undeniably physical; to produce them the organic
processes must have been sensibly disturbed. Yet their cause lies
entirely in the idea of illness, which, ruthlessly impressed upon the
mind, realises itself in the Unconscious.

This effect may be so precise as to reproduce the actual symptoms of
the disease described. Medical students engaged in the study of some
particul