In this way we may explain the apparently sudden and direct appearance of dream-states. The entire carrying over of the conscious personality into the dream-_rôle_ involves indirectly the development of simultaneous automatisms. "Une seconde condition peut amener la division de conscience; ce n'est pas une altération de la sensibilité, c'est une attitude particulière de l'esprit, la concentration de l'attention pour un point unique; il résulte de cet état de concentration que l'esprit devient distrait pour la reste et en quelque sorte insensible, ce qui ouvre la carrière aux actions automatiques, et ces actions peuvent prendre un caractère psychique et constituer des intelligences parasites, vivant côte à côte avec la personnalité normale qui ne les connaît pas."[83]
Our subject's romances throw a most significant light on the subjective roots of her dreams. They swarm with secret and open love-affairs, with illegitimate births and other sexual insinuations. The central point of all these ambiguous stories is a lady whom she dislikes, who is gradually made to assume the form of her polar opposite, and whilst Ivenes becomes the pinnacle of virtue, this lady is a sink of iniquity. _But her reincarnation doctrines, in which she appears as the mother of countless thousands, arises in its naïve nakedness from an exuberant phantasy which is, of course, very characteristic of the period of puberty. It is the woman's premonition of the sexual feeling, the dream of fruitfulness, which the patient has turned into these monstrous ideas._ We shall not go wrong if we seek for the curious form of the disease in the teeming sexuality of this too-rich soil. Viewed from this standpoint, the whole creation of Ivenes, with her enormous family, is nothing but a dream of sexual wish-fulfilment, differentiated from the dream of a night only in that it persists for months and years.
So far one point in S. W.'s history has remained unexplained, and that is her attack. In the second séance she was suddenly seized with a sort of fainting fit, from which she awoke with a recollection of various hallucinations. According to her own statement, she had not lost consciousness for a moment. Judging from the external symptoms and the course of the attack, one is inclined to regard it as a _narcolepsy_, or rather a _lethargy_; such, for example, as Loewenfeld has described, and the more readily as we know that previously one member of her family (her grandmother) has had an attack of lethargy. It is possible to imagine that the _lethargic disposition_ (Loewenfeld) had descended to our subject. In spiritualistic séances it is not usual to see hysterical convulsions. Our subject showed no sort of convulsive symptoms, but in their place, perhaps, the peculiar sleeping-states. Ætiologically, at the outset, two moments must be taken into consideration: