Knocking

The room I apparently woke in was a large room, with the chief space between the foot of the bed and the opposite boundary wall, which looked an immense way off, and the light did not appear to come in 392 BORDERLAND CASES. [chap. its own creation 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, 6Q, 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. They did not visit persons who were familiar with such visions as sleep approached ; nor did they originate or develop in any way that suggests an unusual or fatigued condition of the retina. Nor again could by any means all of them be explained, like M. Maury's beefsteak, as after-images — revivals of past impressions ; for out of the 43 cases first mentioned only 23, out of the 66 other cases only 26, represented a face, form, or object that was recognised ; while in several even of these cases the person whose figure appeared was a deceased friend or relative who had not been actually seen for months or years. Similarly, of 187 first-hand cases of auditory hallucination in my collection, 63, or more than one third of the whole number, took place in bed. Of these, 19 are described as either awakening the person, or occurring in the very first moment of waking, and in 10 of the 19 the sound was a recognised voice ; of the remaining 44, 17 were unrecognised voices, 11 were non- vocal sounds such as ringings and knocks, and only 16 represented recognised voices. It would seem, then, that the reasons which make bed a specially favourable place for such experiences are to be sought, not only in peculiarities of the sense-organs at the moments immediately contiguous to sleep, but in the more general conditions of quiet and passivity, of a comparatively anaemic brain, and of the partial lapse of