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Dr. Charles Baudouin has written a preface to this 289 octavo-page work, saying that the author is not a professional; i.e., not a psychiatrist but an amateur, without ulterior motives of gain, who would study “subconscious” processes by a special method, here entitled a method of the waking dream. Having recently read Jung's Individuation process in the dream, Dalbiez's two volumes and Beguin's literary study of the dream in the light of the German romanticists, Dr. Baudoin would commend this volume at the same time that he quite naively speaks of psychoanalysis as dealing only with pathological material.
The book, as we see it, is merely an amateurish throw back to the days of James, Prince, Janet, Myers and the psychic researchers who-thought in terms of a subcortex which functioned as a subconscious.
Originally intrigued by seeing at a circus a hypnotic seance a bloodless pin prick, at the age of seven, and somewhat later a sort of post hypnotic suggestion, the author—after the war—decided to follow up the matter, and commencing with crudely invoked hypnoidal dream states, went on to self study and that of others of induced semi-hypnoidal states, at first to “develop supernormal” mental capacities (telepathy, etc.).
The spontaneously evoked images are then discussed, with a glance at current notions of suggestibility, etc., confining them to ideas of Ascent and Descent, also, some examples of Freud's “Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” illustrative of unconscious processes. The method then would go on with free association, as in a Freudian analysis, to the invoked dreams. Symbolism thus comes up for discussion, the author following Dalbiéz as to the logic of the Freudian conceptions. The work then goes on to some experiences with peyotyl, without any reference to the rich literature on the subject on mescalin and its allies.
Chapter III deals in a somewhat similar simple manner with symbolism, invention and memory, and speaks of his “method” as facilitating ‘hyperm