From the above we see that girls have on an average fewer clear ideas than boys, save concerning religious matters, funerals, and things which concern the feelings and the seasons. Some of the misconceptions of children were remarkable. Some know moving, but not stationary clouds. Very much that passed under the children's eyes every day was not noticed. School work must be built upon a very poor foundation of clear ideas. The fact that children see objects a hundred times without acquiring consciousness of it suggests that we need to converse with children about the commonest things.

G. STANLEY HALL

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAYDREAMS 1

Perhaps not the least difficult question in connection with the present topic is what mental states shall be included under the term daydreaming. The usual definition" an idle exercise of the imagination during waking hours" by no means covers the material of the returns, which include nearly every form of mental reproduction from the hypnagogic state, with complete absence of voluntary control, through varying phases in which the initial idea or general trend of the images is voluntarily determined, up to a distinctly purposive picturing of the future with due attention to probable realization. There are, however, certain characteristics which are common to this entire series of phenomena, namely a withdrawal of the attention, more or less complete, from the external senses, and a greater or less degree of mental automatism. Fechner 2 considers that in so far as attention is withdrawn from the senses, their condition is precisely the same as in real sleep, and "vice versa the whole sphere of the activity of inner representations may fall asleep." According to this view, the mental life oscillates between sleeping and waking, and there are regions of the brain asleep even in waking states and the distinction between dreams and daydreams is merely one of degree. For convenience in classification, daydreaming may be tentatively defined as including all those reproductive and imaginative mental states in which there is a greater or less degree of automatism in the images which come before the mind. Its limits

1 Reprinted in abridged form from the American Journal of Psychology, Vol. XV, pp. 465-488, October, 1904.

2 G. T. Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik, Vol. I, p. 440, 2te Aufl. Breitkopf, Leipzig, 1889.

would be, on the one hand, the hypnagogic states which immediately precede sleep, and on the other, states of purposive thinking in which the mind becomes so filled with the subject that its workings tend to become automatic. Some of those who answered the questions attempted definitions, a few specimens of which are here given.

1

F., 14. Daydreams are the thoughts and wishes which we imagine. M., 15. Daydreams are dreams about things which are fancied and which have no real foundation.

F., 16. Daydreams are thoughts about what we want the most.

F., 16. Daydreaming is simply the soul longing for something great. F., 13. In daydreams, you first start out to think about one thing and then your mind wanders over many things which may or may not be connected with what you first start to think about. It is really going to sleep because you don't work with anything but your brain. You generally have daydreams when everything about you is quiet and you have nobody to talk to. You think, but you don't express your thoughts in words; it's your brain that is holding a conversation.

The material for the present study was collected in response to a request contained in a syllabus on dreams.

"Ask all who can to write about their daydreams, what they are most often about, where and when they lapse to reverie most often, and if they enjoy it or think it wrong, etc.; and describe one or more in detail.”

469 papers were received from normal-school pupils of ages averaging from seventeen to twenty-five, 980 from pupils in the graded schools of ages ranging from seven to sixteen years, 23 from adults, and 3 contributions were received from those who had passed the age of ninety, making a total of 1475 cases. Of these 535 were from girls and 445 from boys in the graded schools. The normal-school material was chiefly from girls, and of the adults slightly over one half were men. Among the entire 1475 cases there were five (3 males and 2 females) who stated positively that they never had daydreams; but of

1 F. indicates female; M., male; numbers indicate age in years.