Meanwhile it steals into our waking life in many ways. It comes in emotions, presentiments, harp tones, mystical conceptions, and minglings of images or ideas, and incomprehensible deductions, which are sometimes, of course, prophetic. It has nothing in common with common sense; therefore it is to some un-common sense, or to others non-sense. Sometimes it is one or the other. Agreeable sensations and their harmony become the Beautiful. These blend and produce a general æsthetic sense. It becomes mystical, and is easily worked on by the alter-ego. The most inspired passages of every poet on the beauty of Nature betray clearly the influence and hidden power of the Dream in waking life. Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, were all waking dreamers de la première force. He who has heard an Æolian harp play--and I have heard the seven of Justinus Kerner in the old castle of Weibertreu when I was his guest--if he be a "tone-artist," has often caught series of chords which were almost melodies. This music has the same relation to definite composition which the dream has to waking common sense. There are two things which I do not understand. One is, why composers of music make so little use of the suggestive Æolian harp; the second is, why decorative designers never employ the folding mirror [18] to produce designs. The one is an exact counterpart of the other, and both are capable of revealing inexhaustible harmonies, for both are deeply in accordance with the evolving processes of Nature. The poetic or artistic faculty is, we therefore assume, the action on the myriad cells of memory by a strange--sometimes apparently involuntary--fantastic power, which is at the same time higher and lower than common sense or waking consciousness. Every image which man has received from sensation lies stored away in a cell, and is, in fact, a memory by itself. There is a faculty of association or sympathy by which groups of these images are called up, and there is perception which receives them, more or less vividly, like a photographic plate. When awake, Will, or coherent Common Sense, regulates all this machinery. When asleep, the Images seem to steal out and blend and frisk about by themselves in quaint dances, guided apparently by a kind of power whom I have conventionally called the alter-ego. This power throws open brain or memory-cells, which waking Common Sense has forgotten; in their chaotic or fantastic searches and mingling they produce poetry; they may chance on prophecy, for if our waking self had at command the immense latent knowledge in which these elves revel, it would detect sequences and know to what many things would lead, now unto us all unknown.