And yet my Astrophel will lean to the vagaries of our pseudo-psychologists, who believed the dream to be the flight of the soul on a visit to other regions; and its observation of their nature and systems from _actual survey_. Of the fruits of this ethereal voyage the dreamer, I presume, is made conscious when the soul returns to the brain, its earthly pabulum or home. Were this so, it should enjoy visions of unalloyed beatitude; and even were there a limit to its excursions, a thing so pure and perfect would select angelic communion only. I do not aver that such things _are not_, but that we _cannot_ _know it here_. We have no satisfactory remembrance of cities and temples thus surveyed, more gorgeous than the waking conceptions of the thousand and one nights; or the legends of the genii; no wonders or eccentricities which eclipse the exploits of Gulliver, Peter Wilkins, Friar Bacon, or Baron Munchausen. Lavater carries out this caprice, by a very fine metaphysical thought, to illustrate the night-apparition. That it is their “transportive or imaginative faculty that causes others to appear to us in our dreams.” And I myself was once gravely told by a visionary, that he dreamed, one night, of a certain old woman; and _she_ afterwards told _him_, that she dreamed she was, on that very night, _in his chamber_. So, you perceive, her imago, or material thought, entered into his mind, and caused his dream. Is not this sublime? Now it is clear that these illusions cannot tend to advance the dignity of mind. Nothing can be more convincing to prove a suspension of judgment. Remember that during this life,—the incorporation of the soul,—we are conscious of it _only through the brain_. It is not yet emancipated; and it is an error to think, because sometimes we have a brilliant vision, that _therefore_, if the body were more inactive, the soul would be more ethereal. ASTR. And yet we are assured that Alexander, and Voltaire, and La Fontaine, and Condillac, and Tartini, and Franklin, and Mackenzie, and Coleridge, were wont to compose plans of battles, and problems, and poems, in their _dreams_, with a degree of vigour and facility, far exceeding their waking studies. EV. This very facility proves that there was association from memory, without volition or effort; the mind being in a state of _reverie_, and the senses quiescent. In this consists the vivid and delightful visions lighted up by our memory in slumber, especially when there is darkness and silence, so that there is no perception; or when the mind is concentrated, and has been reposing, so that its fancy is a novelty. But this identifying, by Sir Thomas Brown, of reason and fancy, is itself a proof of error. The energy of the first is exercised on _data_ or _facts_; that of the second, in mere _hypothetic_ amusement.