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CHAPTER VII CONSCIOUS AND INVOLUNTARY PROJECTION THERE will be a good deal to say on procedure when we come to the performances of the professional projectors; meanwhile, we may consider some involuntary cases. Here is one from Dr. Gibier's Analyses de Choses, compressed from Ralph Shirley's translation. The narrator was a young man, thirty years old, an engraver by profession. "On returning home one evening about ten o'clock," he said, "I was seized by an extraordinary feeling of lassitude which I was quite unable to account for. As, however, I had made up my mind not to go to bed immediately, I lit my lamp and placed it on the table by the side of my bed. I then helped myself to a cigar which I lit at the flame of the lamp, and, after drawing two or three whiffs, stretched myself on a couch. Just as I had rested my head on the cushions of the sofa I realized that the surrounding objects in the room gave an impression to my mind of turning round. I underwent a sensation of giddiness, and the next thing that I became aware of was that I was transported into the middle of the room. On looking round to get my bearings my astonishment increased. I saw myself stretched on the sofa, quite comfortably and not at all stiffly, but with my left hand raised above me and holding the lighted cigar, my elbow resting on the cushion." His first idea was that he had fallen asleep and was in the toils of an unusually vivid dream, but a dream unlike any other dream he had ever experienced. He felt, moreover, as do most projectors, that never before had he been so closely in touch