It is said that musicians are very prone to the composition of music in dream. It was thus that Tartini wrote the Devil’s Sonata. The most unmusical are often haunted by scraps of tune that no effort will banish. Airs are composed in dream which are remembered upon waking. Perhaps it is not that music is more the subject of dream than other mental creations, but it is the most capable of being retained by the mind and expressed after the dream has vanished. My own experience of this capacity of the dreaming mind has been to myself very surprising; but perhaps the like may have occurred to others, although not recorded. Some time ago I dreamed that I was present and heard as well as witnessed the performance of an entire opera of my own composing. The strange part of it was that I am not a musician and never composed a bar of music in my life. I have a bad musical ear and no musical memory. Yet did my utterly unmusical mind in the dream compose the whole of an opera in two acts, overture and all, with a full band and half a dozen characters, each acting his own part, and the stage, the scenery, machinery and decorations, as perfect as any I have ever beheld and enjoyed at Covent Garden. Certainly it was not a mere dream of a dream. What other solution is there than this—and it is sufficiently marvellous—that my mind, free to act without the incumbering trammels of the sleeping body and exercising its unfettered faculties far beyond their capacity in waking life, had made me a musician, a dramatist, an actor, a painter—for all these that mind was in the invention and performance of that dream? If that mind or Soul be nothing more than the material form, or a function of that form, how comes it that it is more active and that its faculties are more exalted when the body, of which it is said to be a part, is asleep? If the mind or soul be a part of the body, or, as the Materialists contend, a mere function of the body, it ought, according to all known laws of science, to be sleeping with the body, or at least its activity and capacity ought not to increase in proportion as the activity and capacity of the body decrease. I have here used the term “Mind,” because it is familiar to the reader, and any other name would mislead by the prejudices that attach to it. But I must be understood as intending by that term the thing, whatever it be, which, in the Mechanism of Man, directs and controls it intelligently, whether it be called Soul or Mind, and if it be a distinct entity, as Psychology contends, or only the product of the material structure, as the Materialists assert. This, indeed, is the great problem of this age, to be solved, not by dogmatic assertions, but by scientific proof. There are many other Phenomena of Dream of less interest or importance, the description of which would occupy many pages; but those above will suffice for the purposes of this monograph. CHAPTER XI. CONCLUSIONS.