anhoe_ was the fruit of
the astral consciousness impressed upon a brain which fever had
rendered temporarily receptive to the higher vibrations.

There are certain peculiarities of the real dream which prove almost
mathematically the superior nature of the vehicle which gives
expression to it. This dream, for instance, is never of a fatiguing
nature, however long it may appear to last, because it is only an
instantaneous impression made upon the brain by the astral body, when
the latter returns to the physical body, on awaking. On the other
hand, the cerebral ideation of the waking state is fatiguing if
intense or prolonged, or if the nervous system of the thinker is
deprived of its normal power of resistance (_in neurasthenia_); the
commonplace (_brain_) dream is also fatiguing if prolonged or at all
vivid.

Another peculiarity is that a dream--the real dream--which would
require several years of life on earth for its realisation, can take
place in a second. The dream of Maury (_Le Sommeil et le Reve_, p.
161), who in half a second lived through three years of the French
Revolution, and many other dreams of the same nature, are instances of
this. Now, Fechner has proved, in his _Elemente der Psychophysik_,
first, that a fraction of a second is needed for the sensorial contact
to cause the brain to vibrate--this prevents our perceiving the growth
of a plant and enables us to see a circle of fire when a piece of
glowing coal is rapidly whirled round; secondly, that another fraction
of a second is needed for the cerebral vibration to be transformed
into sensation. We might add that a third fraction of a second is
needed for sensation to be transformed into ideation, proving that in
these special dreams there can have been no more than an
instantaneous, mass impression of all the elements of the dream upon
the brain,[7] and that the dream itself has been produced by the
imaginative action of the soul in the astral body, an extremely subtle
one, whose vibratory power is such as to transform altogether our
ordinary notions of time and space.

_The death-bed dream._ In dying people, the bodily senses gradually
lose their vitality, and by degrees the soul concentrates itself
within the finer vehicle. From that time signs of the higher
consciousness appear, time is inordinately prolonged, visions present
themselves, the prophetic faculty is sometimes manifested, and
verified cases are related of removal to a distance, like