Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899: Volume LIV, No. 6, April 1899Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899: Volume LIV, No. 6, April 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
It is in such characteristics as these--at once primitive, childlike,
and insane--that we may find the charm of dreaming. In our sleeping
emotional life we are much more like ourselves than we are in our
sleeping intellectual life. It is a mistake to imagine that our moral
and æsthetic instincts are abolished in dreams; they are often
weakened, but by no means abolished. Such a result is natural when we
remember that our emotions and instincts are both more primitive and
less under the dominion of the external senses than are our ideas. Yet
in both respects we are removed a stage backward in our dreams.
The emotional intensity, the absurd logic, the tendency to
personification--nearly all the points I have referred to as
characterizing our dreams--are the characteristics of the child, the
savage, and the madman. Time and space are annihilated, gravity is
suspended, and we are joyfully borne up in the air, as it were, in the
arms of angels; we are brought into a deeper communion with Nature,
and in his dreams a man will listen to the arguments of his dog with
as little surprise as Balaam heard the reproaches of his ass. The
unexpected limitations of our dream world, the exclusion of so many
elements which are present even unconsciously in waking life, imparts
a splendid freedom and ease to the intellectual operations of the
sleeping mind, and an extravagant romance, a poignant tragedy, to our
emotions. "He has never known happiness," said Lamb, speaking out of
his own experience, "who has never been mad." And there are many who
taste in dreams a happiness they never know when awake. In the waking
moments of our complex civilized life we are ever in a state of
suspense which makes all great conclusions impossible; the
multiplicity of the facts of life, always present to consciousness,
restrains the free play of logic (except for that happy dreamer, the
mathematician) and surrounds most of our pains and nearly all our
pleasures with infinite qualifications; we are tied down to a sober
tameness. In our dreams the fetters of civilization are loosened, and
we know the fearful joy of freedom.
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