“A good friend of mine, Louis Charambon, judge of the criminal court at Digne, had died of the plague. One night, as I slept, I seemed to see him; I stretched out my arms toward him, and said, ‘Hail thou who returnest from the place of the dead!’ Then I stopped, reflecting in my dream as follows: ‘One cannot return from the other world; I am doubtless dreaming; but if I dream, where am I? Not at Paris, for I came last to Digne. I am then at Digne, in my house, in my bedroom, in my bed.’ And then, as I was looking for myself in the bed, some noise, I know not what, awoke me.” In all these and like instances, it is very probable the individuals were much more awake than asleep, for certainly the power to judge correctly is not exercised in dreams, involving even the most incongruous impossibilities. As Dendy[49] says, “if we _know_ that we are dreaming, the faculty of judgment cannot be inert, and the dream would be known to be a fallacy.” There would therefore be no occasion for any such management of it as that made use of by Reid and Beattie, or for the recollection of Aristotle. The dream and the correction of it by the judgment would go together and there would be no self-deception at all--not even for an instant. Dreams would accordingly be impossible. The essential feature of mental activity during sleep, absolute freedom of the imagination, would not exist. Relative to Gassendi’s case, it is impossible to believe that he was fully asleep, and the fact that he was awakened by some noise, the nature of which was unrecognized, and which was therefore probably slight, tends to support this view. Moreover, although he was, as he thought, enabled to detect the fallacy of his dream in one respect, his judgment was altogether at fault in others. Thus he had great difficulty in making out where he was, and actually so far lost all idea of his identity with the person dreaming as to look for himself in his own bed! Certainly an individual whose judgment was thus much deranged would scarcely be able to reason correctly as to the fact of his dreaming or not, or to question the possibility of the dead returning to this world. My opinion therefore is, that during sleep the power of bringing the judgment into action is suspended. We do not actually lose the power of arriving at a decision, but we cannot exert the faculty of judgment in accordance with the principles of truth and of correct reasoning. An opinion may therefore be formed during sleep, but it is more likely to be wrong than right, and no effort that we can make will enable us to distinguish the false from the true, or to discriminate between the possible and the impossible.