or else the parent of it. Until men passed the first stage of being, perhaps that which we call the soul, for want of a better name, or a worse, could hardly have existed, and perhaps in dreams the soul is mostly absent now. The soul, or the principle that we call the soul, is the supernal criticism of the deeds done in the body, which goes perpetually on in the waking mind. While this watches, and warns or commands, we go right; but when it is off duty we go neither right nor wrong, but are as the beasts that perish. A common theory is that the dreams which we remember are those we have in the drowse which precedes sleeping and waking; but I do not altogether accept this theory. In fact, there is very little proof of it. We often wake from a dream, literally, but there is no proof that we did not dream in the middle of the night the dream which is quite as vividly with us in the morning as the one we wake from. I should think that the dream which has some color of conscience in it was the drowse-dream, and that the dream which has none is the sleep-dream; and I believe that the most of our dreams will be found by this test to be sleep-dreams. It is in these we may know what we would be without our souls, without their supernal criticism of the mind; for the mind keeps on working in them, with the lights of waking knowledge, both experience and observation, but ruthlessly, remorselessly. By them we may know what the state of the habitual criminal is, what the state of the lunatic, the animal, the devil is. In them the personal character ceases; the dreamer is remanded to his type. III. It is very strange, in the matter of dreadful dreams, how the body of the terror is, in the course of often dreaming, reduced to a mere convention. For a long time I was tormented with a nightmare of burglars, and at first I used to dramatize the whole affair in detail, from the time the burglars approached the house, till they mounted the stairs, and the light of their dark-lanterns shone under the door into my room. Now I have blue-pencilled all that introductory detail; I have a light shining in under my door at once; I know that it is my old burglars; and I have the effect of nightmare without further ceremony. There are other nightmares that still cost me a great deal of trouble in their construction, as for instance the nightmare of clinging to the face of a precipice or the eaves of a lofty building; I have to take as much pains with the arrangement of these as if I were now dreaming them for the first time, and were hardly more than an apprentice in the business.