Vivre, enfin, c'est mourir.

[To live, at bottom, means dying off.]

Maupassant

In his memoirs of the Russian-Japanese war a Russian military surgeon relates an interesting episode. It was just before a great decisive battle. His regiment was to be among the first to enter the slaughter at early dawn. The sleepless soldiers pressed around his tent with the request to be given some remedy against painful erections. He had to prescribe drastic cathartics to draw the hyperemia towards the bowels.

Similar observations have been made during the last Messina earthquake. While the houses toppled over and the flames broke forth, love indulged in its most abandoned orgies. No chaste virgin, no respectable wife thought of resisting the desires of the frantic men. The proximity of death had roused in all the instincts of life.

Recently the newspaper related a touching episode. A girl, fatally wounded, spoke up to a passing workingman: "Kiss me! That I may know love before I die!" These were her last words.1

Where death looms forth the instinct of life also asserts itself. In the fairy story about Old Uncle Death and the Healer, who asks for a new flame to replace the declining flame of his life what does Death answer? "I cannot do it! Some flame must go out so that another may be lit."

1 Arthur Schnitzler has dramatized this motive in his Ruf des Lebens (The Call of Life).

These observations have led Swoboda to formulate a law of "the Conservation of Life." 2 "It consists of the equivalence between life and death," states Swoboda, "and in virtue of it the shedding of sexual cells - for every sexual act need not necessarily lead to increase of life - involves but a temporary decrease of life." He quotes very properly the dictum of Celsius: Seminis emissio est partis animae jactura.

Thus we begin to understand why the dream often represents coitus under the picture of dying; also the remarkable fact that in the dream murder may be a psychic equivalent of the sexual act. It means possession raised to the nth degree, - exclusive and last possession.

Let us turn to these principles as disclosed in the actual analysis of dreams.

A very fine-minded, genial woman, painter, dreams: