The judgment is frequently exercised when we are asleep, but almost invariably in a perverted manner. In fact we scarcely ever estimate the events or circumstances which appear to transpire in our dreams at their real value, and very rarely from correct conceptions of right and wrong. High-minded and honorable men do not scruple during sleep to sanction the most atrocious acts, or to regard with complaisance ideas which, in their waking moments, would fill them with horror. Delicate and refined women will coolly enter upon a career of crime, and the minds of hardened villains are filled with the most elevated and noble sentiments. The deeds which we imagine we perform in our sleep are generally inadequate to or in excess of what the apparent occasion requires, and we lose so entirely the ideas of probability and possibility, that no preposterous vision appears otherwise than as perfectly natural and correct. Thus, a physician dreamed that he had been transformed into a monolith which stood grandly and alone in the vast desert of the Sahara, and had so stood for ages, while generation after generation wasted and melted away around him. Although unconscious of having organs of sense, this column of granite saw the mountains growing bald with age, the forests drooping with decay, and the moss and ivy creeping around its crumbling base.[45] But, although in this instance there was some conception of time, as shown in the association of the evidences of decay with the lapse of years, there is in general no correct idea on this subject. Without going into details which more appropriately belong to another division of this treatise, I quote the following remarkable example from the essay last cited. It appeared originally in a biographical sketch of Lavalette, published in the _Revue de Paris_, and is related by Lavalette as occurring to him while in prison: