(32 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
who describes the attitude of mind in her dreams by saying that she is 
iin a story,” though not as a principal actor, and that the other dramatis 
persone are unable to understand the occurrences which she can explain. 
Once more: The dreams of imaginative writers, to judge from our 
samples, are not of any remarkable poetic value. Only one respondent 
Jescribes her dreams as of extraordinary beauty. What is particularly 
striking is that writers distinguished by their humor do not, apparently, 
carry this happy endowment with them into dreamland. 
We may now pass to another point. I had been much struck by a fact 
sold me by one of the most charming of living English writers, viz.: that 
he possessed a certain power of controlling his dreams, so that he could, 
when disturbed in the midst of an agreeable dream, will to resume its 
thread. It occurred to me that other imaginative writers might share in 
this power, and I accordingly addressed one of my questions to this point. 
The outcome of this part of the inquiry was slight enough, yet not wholly 
without value. Most of my correspondents acknowledged that they had 
no power of the kind. Yet three assured me that they could voluntarily 
prolong a dream. One, moreover—a writer, by the by, whom I should 
include with the other just referred to among the three most brilliant Eng- 
ish novelists of the hour—went further. “I can,” he wrote, ‘ postpone 
waking while I finish hearing some lecture or story or reading some page 
in the dream ” ; and farther : “I frequently alter the development of a 
dream to something else, if I object to it, precisely as in writing a story.” 
Another question directed to the subject of illusions and day-dreaming 
slicited only a scanty result. Illusions of the senses seem to have been 
sxperienced by nine out of the twenty-eight. Since, according to E. 
Gurney, occasional hallucinations occur in normal life in about one case out 
of ten, this would be considerably above the average (roughly as one-third 
so one-tenth). This relative frequency suggests that there may be a special 
predisposing cause, such as the delicacy and lability of nervous organization 
which frequently accompany great imaginative ability, and this conjecture 
is borne out perhaps by the fact that in several cases, including that of a 
distinguished German novelist, the hallucinations are confined to periods 
of illness. As to day-dreaming, the vivid half-hallucinatory realization of 
*ancies, as when one sees pictures in the fire and so forth—the art seems to 
1ave been lost with the halcyon hours of childhood, or if it has been pre- 
served, it is only in the altered form of an artistic weapon deliberately 
subordinated to some literary effect. 
This brings us to another and distinct kind of question, viz. : that which 
sought to unveil the mystery of imaginative composition. Is the mental 
attitude of poetic creation akin to dreaming to this extent, that the scenes 
and incidents present themselves suddenly, distinctly, and with the vivid- 
ness of sense-presentations ? Here again marked variations of experience 
are observable. On one point there does seem, indeed, to be an approach