On one point, the dream and insanity are often _alike_; they are _mental fulfilments of a wish_: and the dreamer, during his slumber, and the madman throughout his derangement, are presented with the spectra of their desires, and their hopes and fears become, _for these periods, reality_. It was with a reference to the wanderings of the understanding in dreams, that Sir James Mackintosh thus writes in a letter to Robert Hall: “These will familiarise your mind to consider its other aberrations as only more rare than sleep and dreams, and, in process of time, they will cease to appear to you much more horrible.” ASTR. And pray, Evelyn, how doth all this profound prosing affect the subject of dreams? EV. By similitude. I may even remind you with devout veneration, of the dreams of a prophet, to prove the brain highly sensitive when these visions are before it. Listen to the words of Daniel, to whom “God gave knowledge and skill in all learning and wisdom.” “I, Daniel, was grieved in my spirit, in the midst of my body, and the visions of my head troubled me.” “And I, Daniel, fainted and was sick certain days.” Even here, may we not believe, that the Creator did not alter his law? It was Dr. Cullen who first drew a parallel between insanity and dreams. As some proof of his insight, we read in Lode of a man who never dreamed until he fell into a fever in the twenty-fifth year;—in Beattie, of a young friend who never dreamt unless his health was deranged. And Mr. Locke thus writes: “I once knew a man who was bred a scholar, and had no bad memory, who told me that he had never dreamed in his life until he had fever.” This immunity from dreams is also most marked in savages, unless during disorder or at the dying moment. Ulloa, Humboldt, and La Condamine, all agree as to the character of indolence and absence of thought and fancy in the native Americans, and it is as sure that they seldom dream. Now whatever influence tends to arrest or derange the _upper circulation_ of the blood in its return to the heart, or to detain it in the vessels of the brain, or which presses on an important nerve, so as to disturb the function of the brain or _spinal cord_, by _continuous sympathy_, may be the _remote_ cause of the phenomena of dreaming. Such are the results of repletion, _dyspepsia_, the supine position, &c. &c. And here, Astrophel, I meet your metaphysician. Galen, and indeed the ancients generally, attributed dreams chiefly to indigestion; but referred their immediate excitement to fumes and vapours, instead of to nervous influence, or cerebral congestion from interrupted circulation. CAST. And here, Evelyn, courtesy might have prompted you to meet my poets. Let me see, is it not Dryden who writes of— “——rising fumes of undigested food, And noxious humours that disturb the blood?” And in a poem believed to have been written by Chaucer, there is this passage: can I remember his quaintness?