Some say that gleams of a remoter world visit the soul in sleep.

-Shelley, Mont Blanc.

"There is reason to suppose that our normal consciousness represents no more than a slice of our whole being. We all know that there exist subconscious and unconscious operations of many kinds; both organic, as secretion, circulation, etc., which are in a sense below the operations to which our minds attend; and also our mental, as the recall of names, the development of ideas, etc., which are on much the same level as the operations to which our minds attend, but which for various reasons remain in the background of our mental prospects. Well, besides these subconscious and unconscious operations, I believe that super-conscious operations are also going on within us; operations, that is to say, which transcend the limitations of ordinary faculties of cognition, and which yet remain - not below the threshold - but rather above the upper horizon of consciousness, and illumine our normal experience only in transient and cloudy gleams."1

No roads of enquiry offer greater inducements to the explorer of dream problems than those leading to the study of the transition stage which lies between sleeping and waking. I have travelled only a short way along these roads, and have been able to do little more than observe their beginnings and their direction.

1 F. Myers, A Note in "Phantasms of the Living," vol. ii, p. 285.

Widely varying stages of consciousness are included within this borderland state. It embraces experiences which stand in so close a relationship to our dreams that no clearly defined boundary can be drawn between them; and on the other hand we meet from time to time within its borders with experiences far removed from dreams, apparently unrelated to our dream life, and which have a very special character of their own.

The process of going to sleep may conveniently be divided into two stages, although no clearly marked division does in fact separate them. The earlier stage, further removed from sleep, is the state of quiet, when the body being soothed and tranquillised, restlessness ceases, when impressions from without need disturb us little, when thought can still be concentrated and directed inwards, and our attention is still under our control. The later stage is the state of semi-consciousness that shades off imperceptibly into sleep, when concentration begins to lessen, attention wanders, and we cease to direct the mind's flight, until finally borderland consciousness gives place to dream consciousness.

I propose to deal first with the earlier stage, the state of tranquillity. At the beginning of this book the question was asked, "Does any faculty of the mind change its character and assume functions different from those which it possesses normally?" I believe that such a change does take place in both stages of the borderland state. In the earlier state of tranquillity certain mental faculties appear to operate with heightened powers; and, as will be seen later, in the stage verging on sleep the same phenomenon may be observed in the case of certain faculties of sense.

In that earlier state of quiet, when the activity of the body is stilled, we are able with the help of darkness to exclude irrelevant visual impressions, and to arrive at a certain measure of freedom from extraneous thoughts. In this condition we may suddenly find that the mind is working in a manner different from that which is normally characteristic of it. At such moments the answer to some difficult question, which has intrigued us and baffled our intelligence by day, may flash into the mind, appearing to come to us from without rather than from within. The missing links of thought that were needed have been supplied, we know not how; we are only aware that whereas something was previously lacking, the chain of thought is now entire, and the deduction drawn from it is complete. The process is similar to that which takes place in the "super-dream," but occurs on the hither side of the boundary of sleep instead of beyond it. In either case there is the same sense of surprise, when the answer comes, provided apparently by an agent or by a mental faculty which does not seem to work in the same way, or with the same limitations of power as our normal mind.

The following note is given as an illustration of such a borderland experience which closely resembles the working of a "super-dream": One of the problems about dreams that this book is concerned with had been occupying my thoughts for some time. I had found it very puzzling, and I made no progress with the chapter that I was attempting to write. One night I had passed into the stage of borderland quiet, and should presently have travelled on to the state of sleep; my passage to the dream world was, however, interrupted by the intrusion of a recurrent word or thought. Without any effort of will on my part the thought proceeded to shape itself. I can only describe my relation to this process as being that of a spectator watching it. From being first a word, and then a nebulous idea, it became more and more distinct until shortly after the argument seemed to be completed, but externally, so to speak, to myself. In order to get rid of the too insistent chain of reasoning, and to avoid the effort of remembering it, I took pencil and paper which lay near at hand and wrote it down. Once written, it was pushed into the drawer by my bedside, and I slept.

During the following days and weeks I was wholly absorbed in other work and in the anxieties brought about by the war, and this record lay in the drawer completely forgotten. So easy is it to lose all recollection of experiences that occur near the border-line of sleep, that when, some three or four weeks later, I came upon the written sheets, and had deciphered the scribbled semi-shorthand writing, I was bewildered as to their origin. At first I thought that I had at some time copied them from a book, but they were evidently intended as an integral part of my own book and argument, and then the forgotten borderland experience came back to me and I remembered it all clearly. The argument which came to me in this way required no alterations; I agreed with its reasoning, but it still seems to me to be not quite "mine," and to be the expression of a mind more logical than my own.