ng recalled by
association the familiar appearance of the high chimneys which rose
above the roof, and while thinking of those chimneys with my eyes fixed
on the manager, he appeared to me to be changed into a very high
chimney, still bearing a human face. Finally, not to multiply examples,
I remember a dream in which I was present at a popular disturbance,
where one woman, more furious than the rest, came to blows with her
husband, and called him a dog. Suddenly the scene changed, and I was
transported to a courtyard in which there were poultry, pigs, and a fine
dog of my acquaintance, called Lightning. Again the scene changed, and I
found myself in a country district with some friends, exposed to a
violent storm of thunder and lightning.

We clearly see from these facts that whatever may be presented to the
imagination is transformed into a real object in the dream itself, so
that it might be called a dream within a dream, and in the last instance
the transmutation passes through three images and consecutive objects.
This transmutation not only consists in the transition from our waking
thoughts to the image of our dreams, but it takes place in the act of
dreaming; such is the power of the faculty of perception, in which we
find the first origin of myth in man, and its roots also in the animal
kingdom. Thus the genesis of myth, as far as the entification of the
image is concerned, is the same as that of dreams.

The normal illusions of the senses, which are believed to be real by
primitive men, and by those ignorant of physical laws, have a similar
origin. The objection of such phenomena as a mirage, or the tremulous
effect produced in tropical regions by the refraction and reflection of
light on trees, rocks, and mountains, so well described by Humboldt, is
due to ignorance of the laws of nature, and this is in fact an
entification of the phenomenon, occasioned by the innate tendency to
animation which is proper to the perception. In this it is easy to trace
the genesis both of myth and dreams. The fact of hallucination is more
complex, even in its normal state, that is, in those general conditions
of mind and body in which reason has complete command over us.

Without entering into any analysis of the various forms of hallucination
of which many able psychologists and physicians of the insane have
treated, let us turn to the more ordinary cases in which an image of the
mind is projected on the external world so as