n if my body had instinctively recoiled
without my having been conscious of feeling any fear, I might dream that
night that the car had run over my body. I watch at the bedside of an
invalid whose condition is hopeless. If at any moment, perhaps without
even being aware of it, I had hoped against hope, I might dream that the
invalid was cured. I should dream of the cure, in any case, more
probably than that I should dream of the disease. In short, the events
which reappear by preference in the dream are those of which we have
thought most distractedly. What is there astonishing about that? The ego
of the dream is an ego that is relaxed; the memories which it gathers
most readily are the memories of relaxation and distraction, those which
do not bear the mark of effort.

It is true that in very profound slumber the law that regulates the
reappearance of memories may be very different. We know almost nothing
of this profound slumber. The dreams which fill it are, as a general
rule, the dreams which we forget. Sometimes, nevertheless, we recover
something of them. And then it is a very peculiar feeling, strange,
indescribable, that we experience. It seems to us that we have returned
from afar in space and afar in time. These are doubtless very old
scenes, scenes of youth or infancy that we live over then in all their
details, with a mood which colors them with that fresh sensation of
infancy and youth that we seek vainly to revive when awake.

It is upon this profound slumber that psychology ought to direct its
efforts, not only to study the mechanism of unconscious memory, but to
examine the more mysterious phenomena which are raised by "psychical
research." I do not dare express an opinion upon phenomena of this
class, but I cannot avoid attaching some importance to the observations
gathered by so rigorous a method and with such indefatigable zeal by the
Society for Psychical Research. If telepathy influences our dreams, it
is quite likely that in this profound slumber it would have the greatest
chance to manifest itself. But I repeat, I cannot express an opinion
upon this point. I have gone forward with you as far as I can; I stop
upon the threshold of the mystery. To explore the most secret depths of
the unconscious, to labor in what I have just called the subsoil of
consciousness, that will be the principal task of psychology in the
century which is opening. I do not doubt that wonderful discoveries
await it there, a