But what was the fact? Your mind was then composing all you dreamed that you were reading. It was inventing a continuation of the argument or narrative, or whatever you may have been perusing when sleep stole upon you and you lapsed into dream. Have you never dreamed that you were preaching a sermon, or reading aloud, or composing music, or singing a song? Probably, in your waking state, you could do neither. In dream, your mind does it all without a conscious effort. Nor is it, as some have suggested, merely a fancy that the mind is so acting and not a positive action of the mind. If wakened while so dreaming, the argument, the speech, the song, will recur to the waking consciousness and become a positive memory capable of being subsequently recalled. Sometimes the dream vanishes after an interval and cannot be recollected by any effort of the Will, although it may recur in dream long years afterwards. In this manner COLERIDGE composed that beautiful fragment of a poem, “Kublai Khan.” His mind had wrought the whole in a dream. Suddenly waking with a vivid impression of that dream, he grasped a pen and began to write the remembered rhymes of what had been a long poem, although composed in dream with the speed at which the mind works when untrammelled by the conditions of its material mechanism. He seized pen and paper and had set down the beautiful lines that have been preserved when he was interrupted by some matter of business. On his return to resume the work, the dream had vanished and the world to its great loss has received nothing but the exquisite fragment we read now. This mental exaltation so frequent in dream is recognised in some familiar practices, the reason for which is, perhaps, not known to those who resort to them. In our schooldays, a lesson was best learned by reading it when going to bed. It was then easily remembered in the morning. The advice so often given, when a matter of moment is presented, to “Sleep upon it,” is a recognition of this higher mental action in sleep. The Mind seems in sleep unconsciously to work upon the idea presented to it, and we wake with clearer conceptions and larger views of the _pros_ and _cons_. I have known cases in which a doubting mind has thus been “made up” without conscious perception of the convincing argument. Although in dream the mind works with such wonderful rapidity that the events of a day may be enacted in a few minutes, it has not quite lost its consciousness of the measure of external time. A desire to wake at a particular hour will often be followed by an actual awakening at that hour. Continued mental consciousness of the desire is unintelligible. But in what manner does the mind count the flight of a time whose measure is so different from its own conceptions of time?