Let us place in contrast with such fanciful absurdities a tabulation of some of the veritable indications of dreams, as made by a modern scientist. Lively dreams, according to Dr. Winslow, are a sign of the excitement of nervous action; soft dreams, of slight irritation of the brain, often in nervous fever announcing the approach of a favorable crisis; frightful dreams, of determination of blood to the head; dreams of blood and red objects, of inflammatory conditions. Visions of rain and water are often signs of diseased mucous membranes and dropsy; distorted forms frequently point to disorder of the liver. Dreams in which the patient sees any part especially suffering indicate diseases of that part. Dreams about death often precede apoplexy, which is so connected with determination of blood to the head. The nightmare, with great sensitiveness, is an indication of determination of blood to the chest. To adequately define dreaming must ever be a difficult, if not an impossible task. Professor Wilson, of Edinburgh, has graphically outlined peculiarities which distinguish dreams from the imaginings of wakeful hours and from the hallucinations of madness. The current of thought that rushes through the sleeper’s mind is quite free from the control of his will. Dr. Rush has called a dream a transient paroxysm of delirium, and delirium a permanent dream; but the dreamer’s intellect is withdrawn from almost all relation to external objects; while the lunatic holds communication by all his senses with the world about him. But while sleep has thus closed “the five gateways of knowledge” to the dreamer, he still hears and sees and feels and smells and tastes. An imaginative person, on visiting Niagara Falls, can afterward reproduce it graphically in memory; but his most vivid mental picture seems pale and hopelessly inaccurate when the scene is revisited. The visions of our sleep, on the contrary, are among the most vivid of our life, and where the objects have been seen before, the most accurate. “The main difference,” says Dr. Smith, “between our sleeping and waking thoughts appears to lie in this, that in the former case the perceptive faculties of the mind are active, while the reflective powers are generally asleep. Thus it is that the impressions of dreams are in themselves vivid, natural, and picturesque, occasionally gifted with an intuition beyond our ordinary powers, but strangely incongruous and often grotesque; the emotion of surprise or incredulity, or of unlikeness to the ordinary course of events, being in dreams a thing unknown.”