It seems probable that when this fear makes itself felt he is near to
waking; and probably when we dream, as we often do, that the thing is
only a dream, and hope for rescue from it by waking, we are always just
about to wake. This double effect is very strange, but still more
strange is the effect which we are privy to in the minds of others when
they not merely say things to us which are wholly unexpected, but think
things that we know they are thinking, and that they do not express in
words. A great many years ago, when I was young, I dreamed that my
father, who was in another town, came into the room where I was really
lying asleep and stood by my bed. He wished to greet me, after our
separation, but he reasoned that if he did so I should wake, and he
turned and left the room without touching me. This process in his mind,
which I knew as clearly and accurately as if it had apparently gone on
in my own, was apparently confined to his mind as absolutely as anything
could be that was not spoken or in any wise uttered.
Of course, it was of my agency, like any other part of the dream, and it
was something like the operation of the novelist's intention through the
mind of his characters. But in this there is the author's consciousness
that he is doing it all himself, while in my dream this reasoning in the
mind of another was something that I felt myself mere witness of. In
fact, there is no analogy, so far as I can make out, between the process
of literary invention and the process of dreaming. In the invention, the
critical faculty is vividly and constantly alert; in dreaming, it seems
altogether absent. It seems absent, too, in what we call day-dreaming,
or that sort of dramatizing action which perhaps goes on perpetually in
the mind, or some minds. But this day-dreaming is not otherwise any more
like night-dreaming than invention is; for the man is never more
actively and consciously a man, and never has a greater will to be fine
and high and grand than in his day-dreams, while in his night-dreams he
is quite willing to be a miscreant of any worst sort.
It is very remarkable, in view of this fact, that we have now and then,
though ever so much more rarely, dreams that are as angelic as those
others are demoniac. Is it possible that then the dreamer is let into
his goods (the word is Swedenborg's again) instead of his evils? It may
be supposed that in sleep the dreamer lies passive, while his proper
soul is away, and other spirits, celestial and infernal, have free
access to his mind, and abuse it to their own ends in the one case, and
use it in his behalf in the other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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