§ 1. In the cases of the last chapter, the percipient, at the moment of percipience, was distinctly asleep. But the passage from sleep to waking admits of many degrees; and a very interesting group of cases remain which cannot properly be classed as dreams, and yet which do not appertain to seasons of complete normal wakefulness. The discussion of these experiences, which occur on the borderland of sleeping and waking, will form the natural transition to the waking phenomena with which we shall be occupied during the remainder of our course. The wholeset of cases in which telepathic impressions take a sensory form really belong to one large genus; whatever the state of the percipient may be, percepts or quasi-percepts which are not originated by anything within the normal range of his sense-organs are and must be hallucinations. For convenience, however, that term is confined to waking experiences, for which there is no other designation. Accordingly, as I have before spoken of veridical dreams I shall in future have to speak of veridical hallucinations; and we are now to take the step which leads from the one class to the other.

There are certain reasons why this borderland might be expected to be rich in telepathic phenomena. An impression from a distant mind may or may not originate a sensory hallucination; but if it does so, this seems more specially likely to occur at any season, or in any state of the organism, which happens to be favourable to sensory hallucinations in general. Now the state between sleeping and waking has this character. Persons who have never had hallucinations of the senses at any other times, have experienced them in the moments which immediately precede, or immediately follow, actual sleep. And though neither form of experience is common, an examination of a number of instances seems to show that conditions which come nearest to those of sleep are more favourable than those of ordinary waking life, for the bodying forth of subjective phantasms.l

Of the hallucinations which precede sleep, the best known class have received the name of "illusions hypnagogiques." They have been carefully described by Muller, Maury, and other writers, who have themselves experienced them. For the most part they seem to begin with an appearance of bright points and streaks, which then form a more or less complicated pattern, or develop into a scene or landscape.1 In these cases, it is probable that the origin of the phenomena is a slightly abnormal condition of the retina, and that elements of actual sensation from this peripheral source form the basis of the phantasmagoria which the mind elaborates. But there is another form, involving no peculiarity of the external organ, where some object that has been actually seen during the day seems to reappear before the eyes with all the vividness of reality. Maury gives a case of an "after-image" of the sort, which well exemplifies the stage between reality and dream. After a fatiguing day, his eyes had been gladdened by the sight of a beefsteak, which was to form his dinner. After dinner he became drowsy; and in this state he had a distinct vision of this very steak, apparently as real and palpable as ever. Lapsing then into actual sleep, he had a vivid dream, in which the steak again reappeared.

Here it is clear that the "hypnagogic" hallucination was as truly the projection of the percipient's own mind as the dream.

1 The same seems to hold good in distinctly morbid cases. (See Dr. Pick's remarks in the Vienna Jahrbuch fiir Psychiatrie for 1880, vol. ii., p. 50.) Dr. Maudsley says that, in recovery from chronic alcoholism, the hallucinations continue to occur between sleeping and waking, when they have ceased to occur at other times. (The Pathology of Mind, p. 485).

The hallucinations which immediately follow sleep are not infrequently the result of a previous dream, some feature of which is prolonged into waking moments, and becomes temporarily located among the objects that meet the eye. An Oxford undergraduate tells me that, having had a very vivid dream of being chased by a figure in green, he woke and saw the green figure in the middle of his room. "I had no doubt that I was awake, for I saw the light from the street lamp shining on my door. The figure was not in this light but nearer the bed, and the green tinge was very perceptible." The Rev. E. H. Sugden, of Bradford, writes to me: "Once I had a most vivid dream about a man whom I knew well. On suddenly waking, I saw him, in the light of early morning, standing at my bedside in the very attitude of the dream. I looked at him for a second or two, and then, putting my foot out, I kicked at him; as my foot reached him, he vanished." Another informant had a dream, in the train, of looking at her watch, and on waking saw the dial before her eyes "larger than the real one, and blue: after a few moments it flickered and went out like a candle." In these cases the impression was scarcely more than momentary; but other informants - among them Professor Balfour Stewart - have told me of similar experiences of their own which lasted a good many seconds; and in the stock example of the books, the dream-baboon remained grinning in a corner even while the percipient was sufficiently himself to walk across the room - a striking illustration of the psychological identity of the dreaming and the waking image.

More striking are the cases where the images, though immediately following sleep, are not a continuance of a dream, or at any rate of a dream of which the slightest memory survives. ' Of course these experiences may not all have been hallucinations in the strict sense, but only misinterpretations of actual sensation - that is to say some article of furniture or real object in the room may have served as the basis for the delusive image; and momentary illusions of this sort are perhaps not very uncommon.2 But even so, the mind has imposed its own creation and passivity, of a comparatively anaemic brain, and of the partial lapse of the higher directive psychical activities. We cannot, I think, safely reckon darkness as among these conditions, as a large proportion of the cases have occurred when the room was light - for instance, in the early hours of a summer morning.

1 See some excellent examples in the next chapter, p. 300, note.

2 For instance, Mr. Paul Bird, of 39, Strand, Calcutta, tells me that some years ago he woke, and saw a native standing against the wall, who on being regarded sank into a squatting posture. " I jumped out of bed, caught the intruder by the throat, from within on what met the eye from without; and such cases, therefore, still bear out my point, that the tendency to externalise and objectify mental images is strongest at one special season of waking life. Of 302 cases of hallucinations of sight (exclusive of those given as telepathic evidence in this book), of which I have collected first-hand accounts during the last three years, as many as 43 - that is, a seventh of the whole number - have taken place during the first few moments after waking. It is equally noteworthy that of the remainder, 66, making in all more than a third of the whole number, occurred to persons who were in bed - a proportion far in excess of that which the number of waking minutes spent in bed bears to the total number of waking minutes. Few of these cases, moreover, were of a character that would allow us to class them as illusions hypnagogiques.