here what heat does for sealing wax, and permits the fixation of the group of images, disordered as they may be, that burst out at the opportune moment. But while we can expose the wax again to the fire, these curious products of fancy do not bear remelting, and the ideas or the cerebral cells continue fixed in the fortuitous relations that were contracted at that privileged instant. How else can we account for associations so absurd and at the same time so persistent as that of a day of the week with a person stealing or selling some indefinite thing? We can not reconstitute the striking incident or the collection of unforeseen relations and subtle analogies which accomplished the soldering of two such heterogeneous things in M. F's mind; but it is supposable that the operation is effectuated at once, and that the initial plasticity was immediately spent; for the thing stolen and sold continues always indistinct, in spite of the natural curiosity which would ultimately have precisely identified it, if the activity of the imagination had retained the slightest hold upon it.
The same remark may be applied to the other incomprehensible details abundant in M. F's personifications. We might speak of fragments of dreams suddenly registered and riveted forever to the words which the caprices of the nocturnal imagination had momentarily brought into relations with them. The dissociation of words from their usual sense and their application to other images by virtue of a connection which the dreamer clearly feels and finds quite natural, but which vanishes on awakening to give place to the opposite feeling of complete incoherence, are in fact a frequent feature of dreams. In the personifications the images attached to the words independently and outside of their proper sense are nearly always as arbitrary as the dream, but permanent, and the connection is felt by the subject, although he himself knows that it is irrational and inexplicable.
The physiological conditions of this singular process are still unknown to us. No evidence of heredity has been brought to light in the particular case. Still, the fact that M. F has never met an echo in his family when he speaks of his impressions does not prove that his parents have not in their infancy experienced similar phenomena, which have disappeared and been forgotten in older life.—Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from L'Année Psychologique.
