als above the age of sixty-five
de Sanctis found dreams were rare; atmospheric influences seem to be
important elements in causing them; memory of them is weak; they are
emotionally poor, and deal with long past scenes.

_Dreams of Adults._--Any attempt to record or influence our dreams may
be complicated by (a) direct suggestion, leading to the production of
the phenomena for which we are looking, and (b) indirect suggestion
leading to the more lively recollection of dreams in general and of
certain dreams in particular. Consequently it cannot be assumed that the
facts thus ascertained represent the normal conditions. According to F.
Heerwagen's statistics women sleep more lightly and dream more than men;
the frequency of dreams is proportional to their vividness; women who
dream sleep longer than those who do not; dreams tend to become less
frequent with advancing age. The total number of remembered dreams
varies considerably with different observers, some attaining an average
of ten per night. The senses mainly active in dreams are, according to
one set of experiments, vision in 60%, hearing in 5%, taste in 3%, and
smell in 1.5%, where the dreamers had looked at coloured papers before
falling asleep; when taste or smell had been stimulated, the visual
dreams fell to about 50%, and the sense stimulated was active twice as
often as it would otherwise be; dreams in which motion was a prominent
feature were 10% of the former class, 14% and 18% of the two latter.
Experiments by J. Mourly Vold show even more distinctly the influence of
suggestion both as to the form, visual or otherwise, and the content
(colours and forms of objects) of dreams. According to most observers
dreams are most vivid and frequent between the ages of 20 and 25, but H.
Maudsley puts the maximum between 30 and 35. De Sanctis got replies from
165 men and 55 women: the proportion between the sexes closely agrees
with the results attained by Heerwagen and M. W. Calkins; 13% of men and
33% of women said they always dreamt, 27% and 45% often, 50% and 13%
rarely, and the remainder (precisely the same percentage for men and
women--9.09) either did not dream or did not remember that they dreamt.
Nearly twice as many women as men had vivid dreams; in the matter of
complication of the dream experiences the sexes are about equal; daily
life supplies more material in the dreams of men; nearly twice as many
women as men remember their dreams clearly, a fact which