We have parallels to such semi-spontaneity of action of an habitual idea in every-day life. In a preoccupied state of mind we engage upon some act only to wake to find ourselves doing not the thing we started to do, but the habitual one. I knew a man who, having come home late and gone upstairs to dress for a ball, which he proceeded to do mechanically, suddenly found himself in bed. The preparatory taking off of his clothes had started the machinery, which, in default of supervision, had run then itself and fatally done the habitual thing.
Of peculiarly poignant ideas we all know countless examples of the persistent manner in which they turn up in season and out of it. They are forever showing their faces amid the ever-changing crowd of other thoughts.
That the hypnotic subject seems to be on the lookout for everything connected with his hypnotizer is of course a purely unconscious one. It is paralleled in waking life by the exceeding sensitiveness of any acute idea to anything connected with itself. The lover, the politician, the burglar, are alive to actions related to their quest which to other
