ASTR. We have often discoursed on the psychology of Locke, Evelyn, and we are now involved in one of its most interesting points—_innate idea_. Is the dreamer _conscious_ of his dream? It has been asserted, especially by two profound metaphysicians, Beattie and Reid, that they _persuaded_ themselves in their dreams that they _were_ dreaming, and would then attempt to throw themselves off a precipice; this awoke them, and proved the impression a fiction. Were there not present in this, volition and consciousness; and is it not an evidence of an innate idea without sensation? EV. No. A train of thought and passive memory may take place without volition, even in a waking mind; a train of _reasoning_ cannot. So feeling and _passive_ thought may in the mere dream, but not a _conscious acting_ on it. The phenomena, and the expressions used to describe these impressions, are precisely illustrative of another condition of sleep, to which we have not yet pointed. This notion of Beattie was but an echo of Aristotle. The Stagyrite himself was subject to dreams of danger, and, after a while, he used to whisper to himself: “Don’t be frightened,—this is only a dream:” the glaring proof that it was _not_; and yet psychologists still talk of the _management_ of a dream. The fairest explanation is, that there has been a predetermination on some point, and _unconscious_ ideas on the same point are elicited, or may be the first to present themselves to the mind in the morning, _at the moment_ we awaken, and thus it is the first which the judgment acts on in its reverie; that is, the line between dreaming and being awake. If there be many organs asleep, there is still some _clouding_ of this judgment; but if that be asleep also, there is an absolute dream. If we _know_ that we are dreaming, the faculty of judgment _cannot_ be inert, and the dream would be _known_ to be a _fallacy_. We might, by thinking, render our dream what we pleased, and be sure we should never wish for devils or dangers. The essence of the dream is that it is _uncontrolled_: other states are not dreaming. Above all, if judgment influenced the dream of Beattie, who was not a madman, would he have _wished_ to have toppled down headlong from a rock? Listen to Johnson on this point. “He related that he had once, in a dream, a contest of wit with some other person, and that he was very much mortified by imagining that his opponent had the better of him. Now.” said he, “one may mark here the effect of sleep in weakening the power of reflection; for had not my judgment failed me, I should have seen that the wit of this supposed antagonist, by whose superiority I felt myself depressed, was as much furnished by me as that which I thought I had been uttering in my own character.” Nay, in the words of Beattie himself, in his “Essay on Truth,”—