to give up their money by sticking their feet into burning coals. The Duchess of Abrantés, whose secretary he imagined himself in the dream, then entered.
6. A drop of water was let fall on his forehead. He imagined himself in Italy perspiring heavily and drinking white wine of Orvieto.
7. When a burning candle was repeatedly focussed on him through red paper, he dreamed of the weather, of heat, and of a storm at sea which he once experienced in the English Channel.
D'Hervey,34 Weygandt,75 and others have made other attempts to produce dreams experimentally.
Many have observed the striking skill of the dream in interweaving into its structure sudden impressions from the outer world in such a manner as to present a gradually prepared and initiated catastrophe (Hildebrandt)35. "In former years," this author relates, "I occasionally made use of an alarm clock in order to wake regularly at a certain hour in the morning. It probably happened hundreds of times that the sound of this instrument fitted into an apparently very long and connected dream, as if the entire dream had been especially designed for it, as if it found in this sound its appropriate and logically indispensable point, its inevitable issue."
I shall cite three of these alarm-clock dreams for another purpose.
Volkelt (p. 68) relates: "A composer once dreamed that he was teaching school, and was just explaining something to his pupils. He had almost finished when he turned to one of the boys with the question: 'Did you understand me?' The boy cried out like one possessed 'Ya.' Annoyed at this, he reprimanded him for shouting. But now the entire class was screaming 'Orya,' then 'Euryo,' and finally 'Feueryo.' He was now aroused by an actual alarm of fire in the street."
Garnier (Traité des Facultés de l' Âme, 1865), reported by Radestock,54 relates that Napoleon I., while sleeping in a carriage, was awakened from a dream by an explosion which brought back to him the crossing of the Tagliamento and the bombarding of the Austrians, so that he started up crying, "We are undermined!"
The following dream of Maury48 has become celebrated.
