The most wonderful of the many wonders that attend the condition of dream is the development of the _inventive_ faculty so far beyond its capacity in the waking state. Reflect for a moment what this performance is. Every dreamer, however ignorant, however stupid, however young, performs a feat which few could accomplish in the waking state, when in full command of all their mental faculties. Every dream is a story. Most dreams are dramas, having not a story merely, but often many actors, whose characters are as various as on the stage of real life. What does the dreaming mind? Not merely does it invent the ideal story; it invents also all the characters that play parts in it! Nor this only. It places in the mouth of each of those characters speech appropriate to the character of each! Yet are all of these dialogues invented by the mind of the sleeper! In a restless night many such dream-dramas, each having its own distinct plot and actors, will be invented by the dreamer, and a dialogue will be constructed by himself in which each of the actors will play his proper part. Strange as the assertion may appear, it is _a fact_ which a moment’s reflection will confirm, that the ignorant ploughboy in his dreams has made more stories and invented vastly more characters to enact them and constructed more appropriate dialogues for those characters than the most copious dramatist or novelist—aye, more than Shakespeare himself! Another suggestive feature of the phenomena of dream is the _marvellous speed_ of the mental action. Working untrammelled by the slow motions of the body, the dreaming mind sets at defiance all the waking conceptions of time. A dream of a series of adventures which would extend over many days is, by the mind in dream, enacted in a few minutes; yet it is all performed—all perfect—all minutely perceived, said and done; proving that, when the mind is untrammelled by the body, it has other very different conceptions of time. May it not be that time, as counted by our waking thoughts, is in truth the ideal time, and that mental time as measured in dream is the real time?