If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closet himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern. -William Blake.

The earlier stage of the borderland state has now been considered as far as my slender experience and knowledge enable me to discuss it, and we must now pass on to the later stage, that which is nearest to the verge of sleep. In the earlier stage the heightening of the mental faculties has been noted. I have made many notes on the similar phenomena which occur in the later stage of borderland consciousness; the curious heightening of sense impressions that take place when sleep is approaching. When we are nearest to sleep the senses become abnormally acute. A sudden apparent increase of the brightness of the light of a candle or lamp at these moments I find is very noticeable and in certain cases appears to act as a signal to the brain that the moment of crossing the border of sleep is at hand.

It would be interesting to compare with others our experience as to the increase in sensitiveness of the sense of smell. If a grain of something like spice or camphor be put under the pillow, or if a rose-leaf or two be left upon it, I find that scent will apparently intensify just before we sleep and when we wake. Three or four tiny grains from a spike of lavender will at such moments produce the effect of a concentrated lavender essence, and a scent so delicate that it would pass almost unperceived by day acquires at these times a powerful fragrance. We become, in fact, like the Princess in the fairy story who, when she lay down to sleep, was able to detect the presence of a pea hidden beneath the seven mattresses on which she rested. It might possibly be worth while to make more carefully planned and recorded experiments with regard to this heightened sensitiveness of the faculties of sight, hearing, and smell in this condition. That this special sensitiveness to these sense impressions does not in my own experience continue in the actual dream state has already been pointed out1 It affects us up to the moment when we come to the border of sleep, but in my experience it never crosses that border-line.

Of all our borderland experiences perhaps none are more attractive or more closely related to our dreams than the curious visions that sometimes present themselves to the mind when the will is in suspension, but whilst we are still more awake than asleep. These visions are so often referred to in books that they are evidently a common experience, although to different people they seem to come in very different forms, and with varying degrees of clearness and intensity. To me they come when, having been in bed, quietly resting for some little time, my attention is arrested by seeing in front of me, as though between the rifts of a slowly unrolling cloud, a picture, which, as I watch it, changes and shifts. I believe that faces are often seen in this way, but the pictures that I see are seldom faces, they are generally landscape pictures with figures slowly moving across them. They represent places that I have never seen, although they are sometimes more or less like places that are known to me. These moving pictures dissolve and change, giving place to others which also come and go.

They are apparently independent of any effort of imagination; their appearance is always rather a surprise, and I am totally unable to guess when or in what form they will come, or what the "picture on the screen" will change into.

1 Chapter X, "Sense Impressions in Dreams*"

The figures that are seen in these pictures move very slowly, and the effect is somewhat like the "dissolving views" which used to be shown at the "Polytechnic" when I was a child, combined with the movement of the cinematograph of to-day, but always as though it were seen through a gap in a curtain of misty cloud which is partly drawn aside. M. Maury, a French writer on dreams in the last century, wrote at some length about these visions, which he looked upon as actually part of the material from which our dreams are made, precursors of the dreams which fill the mind when we are quite asleep. The visions which he describes were generally of faces seen in the dark. Sir Francis Galton also described similar "visions of sane persons'9 experienced in the twilight time between sleeping and waking, having all the appearance of external objects, but which were not produced by any conscious effort of memory or imagination. Dream faces seem from most recorded accounts to be the objects that are the most frequently seen in these borderland visions.

Mr. Frederick Greenwood, in his book on dreams, describes vividly the faces that he was in the habit of seeing in this way: "Always of a distinctive character, these visionary faces are like none that can be remembered as seen in life or in pictures; indeed, one of their most constant and most remarkable characteristics is their amazing unlikeness . . . they strike the view as strangely strange, surprisingly original, and above all, intensely meaning" . . . "In all likelihood," he adds, "Blake's visions were some such phantoms as these, presented to his eyes in broad daylight." It should be noted that these borderland visions, whether of shifting landscapes or phantom faces, are wholly different in character and origin from the mental pictures which a trained memory enables us to call up by a definite act of will The power of recalling scenes and visualising them is one of the best gifts that memory bestows on us, and few things give us greater pleasure than those recollections, which, like the poet's memory of daffodils, "flash upon the inward eye which is the bliss of solitude".

But borderland visions are far clearer and sharper than these; they are actually pictures which seem to be external to ourselves and which we look at; not pictures which are simply remembered. Moreover, it is the essential nature of these "visions" that no exertion of will can summon them at our pleasure, and that, as far as we can tell, they are wholly independent of our control, and not consciously dependent upon memory. Otherwise no special interest attaches to them, and apart from moments of pleasure that they give us they might not be worth even a passing reference, if it were not that they seem to be fashioned, very much after the manner that dreams are fashioned, and apparently come from the same source as that which provides the materials and pictures of our dreams.