forces she can never complete the task. On the other hand, souls
inhabit the world of Ideas. Incapable in themselves of acting, not even
thinking of action, they float beyond space and beyond time. But, among
all the bodies, there are some which specially respond by their form to
the aspirations of some particular souls; and among these souls there
are those which recognize themselves in some particular body. The body,
which does not come altogether viable from the hand of nature, rises
toward the soul which might give it complete life; and the soul, looking
upon the body and believing that it perceives its own image as in a
mirror, and attracted, fascinated by the image, lets itself fall. It
falls, and this fall is life. I may compare to these detached souls the
memories plunged in the obscurity of the unconscious. On the other hand,
our nocturnal sensations resemble these incomplete bodies. The
sensation is warm, colored, vibrant and almost living, but vague. The
memory is complete, but airy and lifeless. The sensation wishes to find
a form on which to mold the vagueness of its contours. The memory would
obtain matter to fill it, to ballast it, in short to realize it. They
are drawn toward each other; and the phantom memory, incarnated in the
sensation which brings to it flesh and blood, becomes a being with a
life of its own, a dream.

The birth of a dream is then no mystery. It resembles the birth of all
our perceptions. The mechanism of the dream is the same, in general, as
that of normal perception. When we perceive a real object, what we
actually see--the sensible matter of our perception--is very little in
comparison with what our memory adds to it. When you read a book, when
you look through your newspaper, do you suppose that all the printed
letters really come into your consciousness? In that case the whole day
would hardly be long enough for you to read a paper. The truth is that
you see in each word and even in each member of a phrase only some
letters or even some characteristic marks, just enough to permit you to
divine the rest. All of the rest, that you think you see, you really
give yourself as an hallucination. There are numerous and decisive
experiments which leave no doubt on this point. I will cite only those
of Goldscheider and Mueller. These experimenters wrote or printed some
formulas in common use, "Positively no admission;" "Preface to the
fourth edition," etc. But they took care to write the w