DREAMING. In complete sleep, there is probably an entire absence of consciousness of external things. Usually, howeVer, there is a certain amount of mental activity, of which we are more or less conscious at the time, and of which we have more or less subsequent remembrance: This is the state knOwn as dreaming. Tim chief feature of this state is "an entire absence of voluntary control over the current of thought, so that the principle of suggestion—one thought calling up another, according to the laws of association—has unlimited operation.' We seem to perform all the actions of life; we experience every kind of mental emotion, and sometimes our reasoning processes are remarkably clear and complete. Thus, when the mind, during sleep, takes up a train of thought on which it had been previously engaged during the preceding waking hours, intellectual efforts may be made during sleep which would be impossible in the waking state. Such cases, however, are not common. To name two instances (quoted by Dr. Carpenter in his essay on sleep in the Cydopadia of Anatomy and Physiology): Condorcet saw, in his dreams, the final steps of a difficult calculation which had puzzled him dur ing the day; and Condillac states that, when engaged with his Cours d'Etude, he fre quently developed and finished a subject in his dreams which he had broken off before retiring to rest.
Occasionally, but by no means commonly, dreams seem to possess a remarkable coherence and congruity in reference to the reasoning processes, or the combinations of the imagination. Most of our readers are probably acquainted with the incident nar rated by Coleridge of himself, that his fragment entitled Kubla Khan was composed during sleep, which had come upon him in his chair whilst reading the following words in Purchas' Pilgrims : "Here the khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto; and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed within a wall." Coleridge continued for about three hours apparently in a profound sleep, dur ing which he had the most vivid impression that he had composed between 200 and 300 lines. The images, he says, " rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensations or consciousness of effort." On awakening, he had so distinct a remembrance of the whole, that he seized his pen and wrote down the lines that are still preserved. Unfortunately, he was called away to attend to some business that lasted more than an hour, and on his return to his study, he found, to his intense mortification, that " though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest bad passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast." In other cases, a dream may
leave a strong general impression on the mind, although particulars, even immediately on waking, cannot be recalled. Tartini is said to have composed the Devil's Sonata i under the inspiration of a dream, in which the arch-fiend challenged him to a trial of skill. The dreamer lay entranced by the transcendent performance of his distinguished visitor; but on awakening and seizing his violin, although he was unable to reproduce the actual succession of notes, he produced from his general impressions the celebrated composition which we have named.
Generally, however, dreams are wanting in coherence; all probabilities, and even possibilities of "time, place, and circumstance" are violated. Friends long since dead appear and converse with us; and events long since past rise up before us with all the vividness of real existence. We may be conveyed to the antipodes, or even to worlds beyond our own, without the difficulty of the distance at all standing in the way. We are not aware of the grossest incongruities, probably because we are unable to test the probability of the phenomena by our ordinary experience; hence nothing tilitt v,e see or do in a dream surprises us. Prof. Wheatstone observes, that " we may wain along the brink of a precipice, or see ourselves doomed to immediate destruction by the weapon of a foe, or the fury of a tempestuous sea, and yet not feel the slightest emotion of fear; though during the perfect activity of the brain we may be naturally disposed to the strong manifestation of this feeling. :gain, we may see the most extraordiL2ry object or event without surprise, perform the most ruthless crime without compuc..tion, and see what in our waking-hours would ciuse us unmitigated grief, without th smallest feeling of sorrow;" and Cicero, who on previously had made D. his stuc. v, justly remarks (De Devinatione, 59), that if it had been so ordered by nature that we should actually do in sleep all that we dream, every man would have to be bound down on going to bed. Occasionally, however in place of this passive condition, the emotions may be highly excited; thus, for exai:ple, the sailor's wife is apt, especially in stormy weather, to dream of shipwreck, and to shriek with terror from its attendant miseries; and those who have once in their lives been exposed to some fearful danger, are apt to have the scene recalled to them in their dreams, either with all its appalling and life-like exactness, or possibly in a grotesque and impossible modification.