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Using a Sumner pneumograph and Marey tambour, the authors obtained spirograms under experimental conditions on a series of one hundred subjects over a period of five years. Fifty-two of these were college students and forty-eight state hospital inmates with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Upon being directed to daydream, eleven of the college students (21.1%) produced apneic pauses at the end of respiration of over five seconds duration, and one (1.9%) over ten seconds. Of the forty-eight schizophrenics, nineteen (39.6%) produced such pauses of over five seconds duration and five (10.4%) over ten seconds in duration. The difficulties of knowing the degree of compliance with directions by the subjects is discussed. Similar apneic pauses were obtained in six of the college students during directed thinking. The spirograms published in this article show a very clear cut effect. The authors call these pauses 'respiratory plateaux'. This term seems to the reviewer to have certain disadvantages. The word suggests not a repetitive phenomena of relatively short duration but rather a shift in respiratory level. It was for this reason among others that Alexander and Saul called this effect an 'expiratory pause'. It is interesting that four of the seven college students who showed this effect upon daydreaming developed difficulties in adjustment before leaving college. This coincides with the statement of Alexander and Saul that this effect was found by them almost exclusively in the more severely disturbed cases. The authors state that the effect 'might possibly be a result of the attention devoted to daydreams rather than to any direct respiratory changes following fantasy'. The significance of the effect remains obscure.