all realities. It brings the dead back among the living without surprise to the dreamer, and embodies them in the entangled stories which have no recollected beginning or end; which run abruptly into one another; confuse personal identities; and blend impossibilities with the most common incidents of life. Shakspeare has well called dreams, the children of an idle 'brain.' That That power in fact is dormant which gives sequence and congruity to the acts of the waking mind.

But still, even here, analogies press closely upon us. The images of sensible objects occurring in dreams would seem to be closely akin to those which the memory furnishes to the mind awake, either by effort of will or by mere automatic connexions of thought. In this case, as in the other, they are vague and fleeting. No effort of will can long detain them before the waking consciousness; and in dreams, unaided by will, they are still more transient and disjointed. In both cases objects of vision minister chiefly to this subjective action, while the waking mind can create by will, or receive unbidden, a sensorial memory of rhythmical sounds, clothing itself often in actual melodies, the reflex music of the brain. This latter point, in its various physiological connexions, has scarcely had its due share of attention.

Regarding, then, the images of dreams, however perturbed in order, as derived from those of daily life, we still have to ask the question, whether this mimic imagery ever goes beyond, with inventions new to the senses? We think not. We may dream of the Centaurs or the winged Assyrian Bulls, as we have seen them in the British Museum, but we do not in our sleep create monstrosities of this kind. Under the most fantastic grouping of persons and incidents, the individual images are not unnatural or distorted. We believe this to be so; but here, as often elsewhere on this subject, we must ask our readers to consult their own experience.

That dreams, however, are generally formed out of unwonted or impossible combinations of events, and that they undergo sudden and fantastic changes as regards persons, times, and localities, are facts familiar to all. These three sources of disorder are, indeed, mainly concerned in the illusions of the night. The personages of the dream appear and disappear, shift, and interchange their acts and positions with magical rapidity. The realities of time and place are lost in the medley of incidents of which the vision is composed. One dream passes into another, as far as consciousness and memory can inform us, without continuity or connexion. This description, however, needs to be qualified in more than one respect. We have

already remarked that the act of dreaming is varied by the greater or less completeness of the conditions which constitute sleep. As the time of awakening approaches, these conditions change; the sensorial powers are partially revived, and the dreams, though still perhaps erratic in the points just mentioned, are more consecutive and consistent in the events they include. We may repeat our belief that to this fact we must look for explanation of those singular stories of problems solved, verses composed, and arguments logically pursued during the hours of sleep.

Again, as respects the erratic character of dreams, analogy is not wanting for its illustration. The mind awake, or nominally so, often wanders almost as strangely. Let anyone, even when thoroughly awake and under ordinary circumstances, seek to retrace the successive thoughts or mental acts of the antecedent half-hour. Unless the mind be engaged on some single and definite object, he will find the task difficult and laborious; and if partially successful in tracking backwards these sequent states, the chance is that they will be found variously broken and divergent, in effect of impressions from without or of internal conditions of the brain and other organs. Though we are all living in this unceasing series of mental changes, few take note of them, or mark how rapid and abrupt they often are even in the calmest moods of mind. All such aberrations are repeated and exaggerated in dreams. The brain, physically affected in sleep, loses more or less those perceptions of time, place, and personality which are wont to guide the succession of mental acts. In the varying degrees of this influence we may best find explanation of many of the anomalies of somnambulism, trance, hypnotism, hysteria, &c., of which we have already spoken. Here, however, as in many questions of like kind, the explanation merely removes one difficulty to bring us in contact with others yet more insuperable.

It has been a question how far the course and objects of dreams can be changed by external stimuli applied to the several senses of the dreamer. Such excitements, it is well known, may be applied as to modify variously the conditions of sleep without actually suspending it. The cradle of the sleeping child affords sufficient evidence of the fact. Shakspeare had this matter in his ever-pregnant mind when he brings in Queen Mab as a fairy experimentalist upon dreams. dreams. But graver experiments have been made on the subject-some of them due to M. Maury himself. Though we cannot doubt the reality of such influence in different modes and degrees, seeing

what we gather both from analogy and observation, yet are the particular proofs of difficult attainment, and experiments need to be often repeated and varied to give them their appropriate value. We have more certainty as to the influence of the internal organs on the course and character of dreams. The digestive organs more especially-disordered, it may be, by the dinner of the preceding day-betoken the hesterna vitia by troublous sensations and troubled dreams. Few so prudent as not to have had experience of nights thus disturbed. The night-mare is familiar as one example; but the particular effects are as numerous as the disorders producing them. The sensations arising from the excretory organs mingle themselves variously also with the incidents of dreams. Even posture, temperature, a hard or soft bed, have effect in modifying them, by altering the conditions of the sleep with which they are associated. Such influences cannot be doubted, difficult though it is to bring the facts into strict evidence. Dreamland is not the land of logic or close scientific induction.

Though less practically important, there is a deeper interest in tracing the connexion of dreams with the events of prior life, whether immediately or remotely antecedent. It may perhaps be affirmed that even in the most entangled series of incidents haunting the brain of the dreamer, there is always interwoven something of his own individuality, present or past. We have elsewhere spoken of the influence of personal temperament and habits of life on the character of dreams. Lucretius in some fine lines describes this, as does Chaucer in a striking passage of good old English verse. To the inimitable Queen Mab of Shakspeare we have just referred. But apart from all authority in verse or prose, we know from unequivocal experience how faithfully particular traits of character, emotions, passions, and personal propensities are portrayed in the dream. The feelings thus reflected from our waking lives, if sometimes pleasant, are often harassing and painful; rendered so in part by the physical conditions of sleep, and the impotence of the Will in regard to bodily functions. There is the feeling of something to be done which we cannot do—of entanglement in difficulties which we cannot throw off-the hurried pursuit of some object which we cannot reach-the effort to speak without the power of utterance-dreams which often awaken the sleeper, and from which, especially where painful memories are involved, it is happiness to be awakened. In young children, however, who do not so readily dissever the real from the unreal, the images and agitation of a fearful dream often continue for an hour or two after sleep has come to an end.

6

It is a saying of Sir Thomas Brown, Virtuous thoughts of the day lay up good treasures for the night. Men act in sleep with some conformity to their awakened senses. • Dreams intimately tell us of ourselves.' We remember to have read a sermon-and a very able one-inculcating the examination of dreams, as a means of recognising and rebuking our faults. They do in truth often denote not merely the grave, but also those lighter shades of character which are lost to our consciousness in the current and familiar events of the day.

We doubt whether the sense of personal identity is ever absent in dreaming, though some writers have supposed it to be so. Language here is incompetent to express things which even thought fails to comprehend. But we may perhaps affirm that the consciousness applied to these visionary events, however strange and incongruous their nature, is in essence the same as that which underlies our waking existence. To pursue the matter further would be merely to clothe poverty of knowledge with a garment of words.

The events immediately preceding dreams might naturally be expected to minister materials to them more largely than those of distant date. And such may probably be the case, especially when mental emotions are mingled with these events. But we may well marvel at the remoteness of those scenes of past life to which our retrospective dreams often extend. Incidents are repeated, and personalities restored, now never present to the waking thoughts of the dreamer, and which might seem wholly effaced from memory. Here again, as so often before, we come to analogy as the best mode of illustrating, if not explaining, these mysteries, and of bringing them into accordance with the unity and identity of our being. The memories of past life embodied in dreams have close kindred with those evoked by incidents, often very slight, of our waking hours. We know nothing of the actual nature of the impressions or images thus latent in the brain; but there they are dormant, it may be, for ever, yet capable of being revivified at any time, sleeping or waking, by coming into sudden relation with present sensations, emotions, or thoughts. In sleep these distant memories are usually vague and dateless -when awake they receive correction from the senses and other faculties. Their origin, however, is the same; and the further we press such examination the more intimate will be found the relations and resemblances disclosed.

We have spoken already of those pale spectra of former dreams, as we may best deem them, which now and then flit

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across the memory, strangely mingling with passing events. Another phenomenon akin to this is the curious hold on the brain which certain dreams seem to acquire; shown by their frequent recurrence, with the same general incidents and feelings, yet without any actual reality of origin. Every observer of himself may here have his own particular tale to tell; but the general fact will probably be recognised. We know an instance where six such dreams, frequently but irregularly recurrent, and this during a period of very many years, are well attested by close observation of the person who is the subject of them. We may presume, though we cannot prove, that the peculiar grasp of these visions on the sleeping mindthedream of dreams,' we may call them-depends on the force of the impressions in which they originated-strengthened, it may be, by repetition. In all our reasonings on these obscure points we are forced to recur to the conception just stated of actual material changes-utterly incomprehensible in their nature-made and infixed on the brain, and probably most forcibly impressed at those times of life when the mental faculties are in greatest vigour. Admitting the latter fact, it explains to us several seeming anomalies of memory; such as the frequent and vivid recollections in advanced age of the events of earlier life, while those of recent occurrence vanish speedily from the mind; and as regards dreams, the similar wandering of the brain among past memories, when present sensations are dimmed by age, and life itself is beginning to assume the character of a dream.

One point remains to be noticed, of which, however, notwithstanding its deep interest to mental physiology, we shall only briefly speak. This is the relation of sleep and dreams to those abnormal or diseased states of mind which we call Insanity-though, indeed, a single term feebly expresses the multiform shapes of such disorders which observation unhappily brings before us. A manifest distinction offers itself here in the outset. The one condition is natural, aud periodical onlythe other is abnormal, and more or less permanent. But, nevertheless, there are certain links connecting them which cannot be overlooked-relations noticed by Cicero and other ancient writers, and more explicitly described by several eminent authors of our own time. Many of the strange hallucina

'Quod si ita paratum esset, ut ea dormientes agerent, quæ somnia'rent, alligandi omnes essent, qui cubitum irent. (Cicero De Divinatione, lib. ii. 59.) In the valuable work on the Physiology and 'Pathology of the Mind,' by Dr. Maudsley, will be found much that relates to this interesting topic.