Often we try, in vain, to recall from our memory a name or an incident that we are certain we entrusted to it; then at another time, without any special effort, we find ourselves remember-ing that name or that incident as though it had come to us from some strange source.

Things like these lead us to believe that we possess a mind we cannot master by our will: the subconscious mind. We can account for this reasonably if we know that our feelings suggest to us thoughts we do not perceive, just as our thoughts create in us feelings of which we may sense only a part. It is psychologically established that the mind forms images of every-thing by which sensation is affected, and these images are faithful or unfaithful in proportion to the precision and clar-ity of the sensation. From this arise the effects which our conscious mind proves unable to explain when they appear to it in our practical and intel-lectual life, and in our imaginative life above all.

Yet even if we explain some of the effects that appear in our mind by the existence of a sub-conscious mind, it is a mistake to believe in the existence of two separate minds in a single body. The subconscious mind is nothing but the margins of the conscious mind, and the process of think-ing and directing the will is nothing but an attempt to concentrate these mar-gins into a single point so that they may acquire a clear and effective force, just as we concentrate the rays of the sun in a lens so that they acquire

the properties of fire. The strength or weak-ness of this concentration of thought depends on the sensations we have recorded in the margins, which become, as we said, images in the think-ing mind.

What we record — or rather, what records itself — in our subcon-scious mind appears to us from time to time, in waking and in sleep alike, and has its good or ill effect on our health and our personality. That is why we see many modern physicians expose some of their patients to sen-sations which, without their being aware of it, leave in their subcon-scious mind an impres-sion that helps to restore their morale and, conse-quently, their bodies.

The results of psycho-analysis show us that an idea may lie buried more than forty years in the subconscious mind and then return, resurrected in memory or in dream.

Dreams and the Subconscious Mind

Here I must state an important reservation: most of what scientists know about dreams is still closer to supposition than to established fact.

Most psychologists believe that dreams con-tinue, in people in their normal states, all night long, but that they remember only those they carry away from the times of light sleep and shortly before waking.

We notice that most of the dreams we remember are the dreams of four o'clock in the morning, when we are on the point of waking.

Most dreams are built upon visual or auditory imaginings. It is a

cause for astonishment, however, that we rarely remember having seen colors in our dreams, or having heard a language foreign to the language of our childhood; and rarer still is it that we speak a foreign language.

Scientists also observe that more than seventy percent of dreams are of the disturbing kind. This is because man avoids thinking of disturbing things while awake, and so dreams come to satisfy his desire to think about the thing, not to enjoy it!

Adolescents dream much of ghosts and jinn; then, a few years later, we find them speaking of dreams in which pleasurable appetites are supposedly satisfied, and speaking much of fright-ening dreams that bring them every kind of torment. Dreams are, for the most part, children of the environment: the soldier dreams most often of battles, the hunter of hunting, the painter of painting, and the student at a flying school has dreams almost confined to piloting airplanes and to disasters in the air.

Dreams may be vivid to a degree that makes people, especially the young among them, con-fuse their dreams with their waking memory: they relate incidents as having actually happened to them when they were nothing but dreams,

and they deny matters they have thought about, believing them to have been dreams!

Hence we see some people take alarm at fears that never befell them at all. The strange thing is that these people usually do not remember the dreams that cause their fear; rather, they remem-ber, or feel, the fear itself. The explanation of this is that the fear passes from their subcon-scious mind to their con-scious mind in the instant that separates sleep from waking, without their being aware of it.

It is established that dreams pass with a strange swiftness! We may dream a whole lifetime in a single instant. It appears that the subconscious mind has been granted such a gift of symbolism as fits it to compress eternities past and to come into a single moment. The difficulty, however, arises in interpreting those symbols. Nor is the difficulty confined to the symbols being obscure; it results more often from our inability to remem-ber all the symbols, or to remember them in their correct order. We remember scraps of the dream from here and there, and we deepen their obscurity when we err in arranging them according to the time of their occurrence,