Dogs reacting

For many years I have been accustomed to see multitudes of faces as I lie awake in bed, generally before falling asleep at night, after waking up in the morning, or if I should wake in the middle of the night. They seem to come up out of the darkness, as a mist, and rapidly develop into sharp delineation, assuming roundness, vividness, and living reality. Then they fade off only to give place to others, which succeed with surprising rapidity and in enormous multitudes. Formerly the faces were wonderfully ugly. They were human, but resembling animals, yet such animals as have no fellows in the creation, diabolical-looking things. So curiously and monstrously frightful were they that I cannot conceive whence they could have come if not from the infernal world. I could not, certainly, at other times, by any voluntary effort of imagination, conjure up anything even remotely approaching their f rightfulness. Latterly the faces have become exquisitely beautiful. Forms and features of faultless perfection now succeed each other in infinite variety and number. 1 will add one more experience, which would, I think, be specially hard to refer to the Licht-staub of the eye, inasmuch as it had an obvious cause of another sort. A friend wrote to me on Sept. 29, 1885 : — Between sleeping and waking this morning, I perceived a dog running about in a field (an ideal white-and-tan sporting dog, 'bred out of the Spartan kind,' &c.), and the next moment I heard a dog barking outside the window. Keeping my closed eyes on the vision, I found that it came and went with the barking of the dog outside; getting fainter, however, each time. 2 M. Binet treats all ghost-seers as so paralysed with terror that they do not move their eyes from the figure — which leaves it open to him to guess that the figure would move if their eyes moved. Brewster {Natural Magic, p. 130) had the same idea. To Wundt, also, stationary hallucinations that can be looked away from seem unknown as a distinct and fairly common type, and he inclines to regard them as mere illusions. x.] HAILUCINATIONS: GENERAL SKETCH. 475 Such visions are commonly explained — and often, no doubt, with justice — as due to nervousness or expectancy. But nervousness and expectancy act by exciting the mind, not by congesting the retina ; they work on the imagination, and their physical seat is not in the eye, but in the brain. We should conclude, then, that the brain initiates the hallucination ; and that nocturnal visions, which vary so greatly both in themselves and in the general