Everything, then, that passes in the dream is--to the dreamer--as natural as events in the waking condition. When awake, events seem, without exception, natural and regular; they also seem natural and regular in the dream. It is true that we find them absurd when we wake, but what of that? They are absurd only by comparison, as looked at from the point of view of the waking man, who is no longer the same that he was when dreaming. Who can tell if we shall not awake some day from what we now call our waking condition, and that we shall not then find the events absurd that we now consider rational and real? Who can tell that we shall not be stupefied at having been so firmly attached to invisible phantoms and disordered combinations? In setting up a fourth distinction it is said that real life forms a continuous whole, while dreams are not connected with one another. The series of my days forms a single life, which holds together. I resume to-day my life of yesterday, and shall resume to-morrow my life of to-day. While I am asleep, the course of it is only suspended. I begin again in the morning at the very point where I stopped in the evening. I find myself in the same medium, occupied with the same thoughts, subject to the same cares, involved in the same routine of events, the same storm of passions. The same thread runs through it all. On the other hand, it is said, our dreams do not form a consecutive existence. The dream of one night has no connection with the dream of the previous night. On going to sleep to-night I have no assurance that I shall find the landscapes or the personages or the circumstances of my last dream. The most diabolical nightmare may succeed a most delightful romance. In short, not only is the form of the same dream incoherent, but our successive dreams are incoherent as to one another. This was what struck Pascal when he wrote: "If we dreamed the same dreams every night, we should be affected by them as we are by things we see every day; and if an artisan was sure to dream every night, for twelve hours, that he was a king, I believe he would be nearly as happy as a king who dreamed every night, for twelve hours, that he was an artisan.... But because dreams are all different, and the same one is so diversified, what we see in one affects us much less than what we see when awake, because of the continuity of the waking life, which is not so continuous and even, however, but that it changes, too, though less abruptly, if only rarely, as when we travel; and then we say, 'It seems like a dream to me,' for life is a somewhat less inconstant dream."