le
irritation. But he does not become sick because the associations
called up are contrary ones. Sea-sickness is associated in his mind
with his own immunity from it, and therefore evokes not fear but
self-confidence. Pursuing your somewhat inhumane experiment you
approach a timid-looking passenger. "My dear sir, how ill you look! I
feel sure you are going to be sea-sick. Let me help you down below."
He turns pale. The word "sea-sickness" associates itself with his own
fears and forebodings. He accepts your aid down to his berth and there
the pernicious autosuggestion is realised. In the first case the idea
was refused, because it was overwhelmed by a contrary association; in
the second the Unconscious accepted it, since it was reinforced by
similar ideas from within.

But supposing to a sick mind, permeated with thoughts of disease, a
thought of health is presented. How can we avoid the malassociation
which tends to neutralise it?

We can think of the Unconscious as a tide which ebbs and flows. In
sleep it seems to submerge the conscious altogether, while at our
moments of full wakefulness, when the attention and will are both at
work, the tide is at its lowest ebb. Between these two extremes are
any number of intermediary levels. When we are drowsy, dreamy, lulled
into a gentle reverie by music or by a picture or a poem, the
Unconscious tide is high; the more wakeful and alert we become the
lower it sinks. This submersion of the conscious mind is called by
Baudouin the "Outcropping of the Subconscious." The highest degree of
outcropping, compatible with the conscious direction of our thoughts,
occurs just before we fall asleep and just after we wake.

It is fairly obvious that the greater the outcropping the more
accessible these dynamic strata of the mind become, and the easier it
is to implant there any idea we wish to realise.

As the Unconscious tide rises the active levels of the mind are
overflowed; thought is released from its task of serving our conscious
aims in the real world of matter, and moves among the more primal
wishes and desires which people the Unconscious, like a diver walking
the strange world beneath the sea. But the laws by which thought is
governed on this sub-surface level are not those of our ordinary waking
consciousness. During outcropping association by contraries does not
seem readily to take place. Thus the mal-association, which
neutralised the desired idea and so