and as
long as the psychical and organic characteristics of the waking state
continue. But in sleep the exciting influence of the brain is
diminished, and the brain transmits much less of the normal excitement
and normal tension to the spinal axis with its ramifications in the
afferent and efferent nerves; in the waking state an external impression
is promptly conveyed to the centres, whence it returns in corresponding
movements with the usual connection and rapidity, whether reflex or
deliberate. Since in sleep the relative condition is flaccid and torpid,
this action no longer takes place. For if the brain be affected by
strong impressions, and these are followed by corresponding movements
due to reflex action, as is often the case, even in sleep, the dreamer
is only obscurely conscious of them, and they almost wholly depend on
the spinal axis, and the peripheral ganglia.

As we have said, the function of the brain is duplex; it stimulates and
directs, and it is also sentient and conscious, and this second function
is persistent in dreams. Although the brain is no longer directed by a
power which dictates psychical acts and phenomena, yet its automatic
action is not destroyed, and to this the apparent reality of images
seen is owing, since there is no longer any distraction from the
external world, or, at all events, its impulses are so attenuated as to
be unobserved. In such conditions past images recur with an appearance
of reality owing to the mnemonic and automatic action of the brain; such
a tendency exists in the waking state, and the images are associated and
dissociated in a thousand ways, by means of analogies, resemblances,
former combinations of facts, and series of facts analogous to those of
the waking state, and are modified by suggestive impulses. We have
experimental proof, to which I can add my own irrefragable witness, that
the stimulating influence exerted by the brain in the waking state is
dormant in sleep, and that only its automatic act of representation
remains active, with the occasional exercise of an aroused and conscious
will.

The following strange and unpleasant phenomenon generally occurs to me
once or twice a year. All at once, in the midst of a deep sleep, I
become wide awake; I am fully conscious of myself, of the place where I
am, of my position and the like, and wish to move like a person who is
fully awake. Yet for some time this is impossible; the psychical,
cerebral faculty is