Indignation, coupled with a strange childish fear, compels me to shout words of adjuration, remonstrance or threat; but enunciation is difficult in sleep, as the tongue refuses to act" (this be it observed, is by no means always the case) "and the unformed words seem to come from the throat, making sounds most horrible, as I am told. All the time I know it is a dream, and I have tried occasionally, but always in vain, to make some movement of the body so as to wake myself up." (It is not a little curious, the will thus helping itself, as it were, by an action that itself suggests. It is an experience that is common with people who strive to wake themselves from a horrid dream.) "However, I have been so often awoken by my daughter rapping on the wall of an adjoining room, whenever she hears me, that I find myself, during the process of the dream, formulating the wish, 'Oh, when is she going to rap, that I may awake'?" (again a very curious and yet typical experience)! "Immediately I hear the rapping I awake and I usually find that I have both arms across my chest, or else that I am lying neither on my side nor my back, but midway between both."

It is rather hard to "box the compass," so to speak, so finely as to understand exactly the point of anatomy meant by "midway between side and back," but on the whole this dream is very typical of the bogey kind, very interesting. This dream, more than any other, may be attributed to bodily discomfort, whether coming from causes without, as from position of body and limbs, or from within, as lobster salad taken late at night. The bogey dream, in fact, is the genuine nightmare. And yet, on this very point, one of my correspondents raises a very curious question: "It is indubitable,", she (a wrll - known writer) writes, "that bad dreams are generally caused by some physical condition, specially that of the digestion. Every one's experience bears this out. How is it then, that in illness, and in cases where digestion is specially at fault, good dreams should be more frequent than bad ones?" It is of course possible to deny the fact, but by observation of my own dreams in illness and asking others for their experience, both personal and such as they have been able to note in others, it appears to me that the fact as stated by the writer is not to be denied, that it is absolutely correct, and that the inference to be drawn from it certainly seems to run counter to the prevalent theory that indigestion causes nightmare.

Perhaps it is only a certain kind, degree, or phase of indigestion. At all events, the question raised is just one of those that we are surprised to find has not been answered long ago, in all the years that science has learnt to be scientific. I find I have been rather severely taken to task by one or two correspondents for saying that it is very rare to dream of ghosts, several asserting that ghosts are a common form of their dream apparitions, but in almost every case I find on reading a little further that what they speak of as "ghosts" are really apparitions of people who are in fact dead, but whom they do not realise in their dreams to be dead. They appear as living people, with no suggestion of the supernatural about them, and thus, as it seems to me, hardly come under the description of "ghost," properly so called, for "ghost" essentially conveys the idea of the supernatural, and of the seer's knowledge that it is supernatural. It is just this knowledge and its inevitably accompanying terror that we do not have in our dream when we seem to see apparitions of the dead.

One correspondent who sees this distinction a good deal more clearly than most people seem to grasp it, says: "I have sometimes dreamt of actual ghosts" (what this means is not quite clear, but probably it means the recognised white - sheeted figure of the graveyard) "and often of people who have died, not as ghosts, but as in bodily life, and yet remembering all the time that they have died. I have a great horror of this dream. Of course I also often dream of them as living, without remembering their deaths, which is quite different." Of course it is that which makes all the difference. Another dream of the true ghost character is that of a daughter who dreamed a cruelly realistic dream in which her father, who had lately died, appeared to "enter the room carrying his coffin". There were many details of the apparition too horrible to relate. Naturally the dream made a very deep and lasting impression, and frequendy recurred. The same person seems quite in the habit of dreaming of ghostly visitations, but such cases would appear to be altogether exceptional and the normal type is of the pursuit, attack or terror of some dangerous beast or some presence that has about it something of the supernatural, while there is an equally supernatural inability to escape until the fearful thing gets very close, when the: terror seems to pass away and at the same moment on awakes.

It is quite common, I think, for the terror to pass, even before the waking moment, though it often also happens that one seems to be awoken by, the very intensity of the terror itself. Sometime an its vicinity, especially the dreamer, with sudden and unaccountable ferocity. In some ways similar is the account of another correspondent: "The first dreams I can remember in my early childhood were of wolves. The 'wolves' varied in appearance between terriers and grizzly bears, but they were always called wolves, and generally ate me. This was uncomfortable, but not painful, and never seemed to do me any harm!" This catching (which we must presume as a preliminary stage, even in such inconsequent affairs as dreams, of the eating, even as the hare has to be caught before being cooked) serves to distinguish this dream from the normal type of the bogey dream, for the normal bogey never catches the dreamer. Much more like the typical bogey dream is this other, which the same writer contributes: "A horrible dream of my childhood was of a book of most terrifying stories. At the beginning of the dream some one would produce the book and read to me, but in course of time I became more or less associated with the heroine.

The stories varied, but the book was always the same." It is not at all unusual for the dreamer to identify himself with some fictitious person of a play or novel. A curious form of bogey is narrated by a correspondent already quoted: "One is often worked up into a frenzy of despair by various objects increasing enormously in size, such as a person or a train at the other side of the room becoming alarmingly bigger as it approaches the unhappy dreamer ". "A house on fire is with some a common form of danger," says the same correspondent in another part of the letter, "from which it seems impossible to escape, and a sudden awakening to consciousness proves a very great and real relief." This is an instance of the normal stationary bogey dream, as one may call it On the other hand, the instance that this writer further quotes seems to show complete departure from the type: "Burglars hidden away in dark recesses of rooms," he says, "behind curtains, etc., usually followed in the dream by a wild and hopeless chase after the offender, and also frantic efforts to bar doors and windows against invaders of various descriptions are most fruitful sources of terror". Well, if terror there be in this, it would seem that the bulk of it is reserved for the burglar, after whom goes the "wild and hopeless chase". It is surely the chased rather than the chaser that ought to be the terror - stricken, and this inversion of the roles differentiates the dream entirely from the normal type of the bogey dream in which the terror of the dreamer is one of the most conspicuous and constant features.