Referring to the calculation of Cabanis, on the falling to sleep of the senses, I can readily carry on this analogy to the faculties of mind. We may suppose that the faculty of judgment, as being the most important, is the first to feel fatigue, and to be influenced in the mode which I have alluded to by slumber. It is evident, then, that the other faculties, which are still awake, will be uncontrolled, and an _imperfect association_ will be the result. Thus the ideas of a dream may be considered as a species of delirium; for the figures and situations of both are often of the most heterogeneous description, and both are ever illusive, being believed to be realities, and not being subject to the control of our intellect. Yet, if the most absurd dream be _analyzed_, its constituent parts may consist either of ideas, in themselves not irrational, or of sensations or incidents which have been individually felt or witnessed. So the remembered faces and forms of our absent friends, faithful though a part of the likeness may be, are associated with the grossest absurdity. “Velut ægri somnia, vanæ Fingentur species, ut nec pes nec caput uni Reddatur formæ.” Or, as Dryden has written,— “Dreams are but interludes which Fancy makes: When monarch Reason sleeps, this mimic wakes; Compounds a medley of disjointed things, A mob of cobblers, and a court of kings. Light fumes are merry, grosser fumes are sad, Both are the reasonable soul run mad; And many monstrous forms in sleep we see, That neither were, nor are, nor e’er can be.” The little variations in the tissue of a dream are not _rectified_ by judgment. So the vision may have led us to the very consummation of the highest hopes with love and beauty, and then, if an object even of degradation or deformity shall cross the dream, an association shall be formed imparting a feeling of loathing and horror. You may take Hobbes’ illustration, Astrophel, which you will probably prefer to mine. Hobbes says of the compositions of phantoms, “Water when moved at once by divers movements, receiveth one motion compounded of them all; so it is in the brain, or spirits stirred by divers objects; there is composed an imagination of divers conceptions that appeared single to the sense; as sense at one time showeth the figure of a mountain, at another of gold, and the imagination afterwards composes them into a golden mountain.” I believe Parkhurst also will tell you, that the Hebrew word for dream, refers to things _erroneously viewed_ by the senses; for each may assume, individually, an intimate accordance with another, although the first and last appear perfectly incongruous, as the Chinese puzzle will be a chaos, if its pieces be wrongly placed; a _faulty rejoining_, in fact, of scenes and objects reduced to their constituent elements.