410. A still more striking illustration may be drawn from the following incident in the story of Dr. Krafft-Ebing's patient,4 lima S., the genuineness of whose stigmata seems proved by that physician's care in observation, and by the painfulness of certain experiments performed upon her by students as practical jokes and against her will: -

May 6th, 1888

The patient is disturbed to-day. She complains to the sister of severe pain under the left breast, thinks that the professor has burnt her in the night, and begs the sister to obtain a retreat for her in a convent, where she will be secure against such attacks. The sister's refusal causes a hystero-epileptic attack. [At length, in the hypnotic trance] the patient gives the following explanation of the origin of the pain: " Last night an old man came to me; he looked like a priest and came in company with a Sister of Charity, on whose collet there was a large golden B. I was afraid of her. The old man was amiable and friendly. He dipped a pen in the sister's pocket, and with it wrote a W and B on my skin under the left breast. Once he dipped his pen badly and made a blot in the middle of the figure. This spot and the B pain me severely, but the W does not. The man explained the W as meaning that I should go to the M church and confess at the W confessional".

After this account the patient cried out and said, " There stands the man again. Now he has chains on his hands".

When the patient woke into ordinary life she was suffering pain in the place indicated, where there were " superficial losses of substance, penetrating to the corium, which have a resemblance to a reversed W and B," with " a hyperæmic raised spot between the two." Nowhere in this peculiar neurotrophic alteration of the skin, which is identical with those previously produced experimentally, are there traces of inflammation. The pain and the memory of the dream were removed by the doctor's suggestion; but the dream self-suggestion to confess at the M church persisted; and the patient, without knowing why, did actually go and confess to the priest of her vision.

1 See Dr. Fere in Brain for January 1887.

2 De l'Intelligence, vol. i. p. 119.

3 Archives de Mfdecine, vol. i. 1876, p. 554.

4 An Experimental Study in Hypnotism, by Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing, translated by Dr. C. G. Chaddock, p. 91.

In this last case we have a dream playing the part of a powerful posthypnotic suggestion. The meaning of this vague term "suggestion" we shall have to discuss in a later chapter. It is enough to notice here the great power of a subliminal suggestion which can make an impression so much stronger not only than the usual evanescent touch of dream, but than the actual experiences of waking day.

411. But this case may also serve to lead us on to further reflections as to the connection between dream-memory and hypnotic memory, a connection which points, as we shall presently see, towards the existence of some subliminal continuity of memory, lying deeper down than the evocable memory of common life - the stock of conscious reminiscences on which we can draw at will.

With regard to memory, as with regard to sensation, we seem in waking life to be dealing with a selection made for purposes of earthly use. From the pre-conscious unselective memory which depends on the mere organisation of living matter, it is the task of consciousness, as it dawns in each higher organism, to make its own appropriate selection and to develop into distinctness certain helpful lines of reminiscence. The question of self-preservation, - What must I needs be aware of in order to escape my foes? - involves the question, What must I needs remember in order to act upon the facts of which I am aware? The selected currents of memory follow the selected avenues of sensation; what by disuse I lose the power of noticing at the time, I also lose the power of recalling afterwards.

For simpler organisms this rule may perhaps suffice. Man needs a more complex formula. For it may happen, as we have already seen, that two or more phases of personality in one man may each select from the mass of potential reminiscences a special group of memories of its own. These special groups, moreover, may bear to one another all kinds of relations; one may include another, or they may alternate and may be apparently co-exclusive.

From these dissociations and alternations of memory there will be many lessons to learn. The lesson which here presents itself is not the least important. What is the relation of the sleeping state to these dissociated, these parallel or concentric memories? Is it the case that when one memory includes another it is the waking memory - as one might expect from that state's apparently superior vividness - which shows itself the deeper, the more comprehensive record? Or can it be that other states - sleep and its congeners - less finished and effective though they be for life's common purposes, may yet show by this test of comparative memory that they embrace and underlie that specialised vigilance which we commonly take for the whole of our intellectual being?