You, Mr. Seminarist, born with the gift of imitation, you have listened to some hundred sermons, and your brain is prepared to make them: moved by the talent of imitation, you have written them waking; and you are led by the same talent and impulse when you are asleep. But how have you been able to become a preacher in a dream? You went to sleep, without any desire to preach. Remember well the first time that you were led to compose the sketch of a sermon while awake. You thought not of it a quarter of an hour before; but seated in your chamber, occupied in a reverie, without any determinate ideas, your memory recalls, without your will interfering, the remembrance of a certain holiday; this holiday reminds you that sermons are delivered on that day; you remember a text; this text suggests an exordium; pens, ink, and paper, are lying near you; and you begin to write things you had not the least previous intention of writing. Such is precisely what came to pass in your noctambulism. You believe yourself, both in the one and the other occupation, to have done only what you intended to do; and you have been directed without consciousness by all which preceded the writing of the sermon. In the same manner when, on coming from vespers, you are shut up in your cell to meditate, you have no design to occupy yourself with the image of your fair neighbor; but it somehow or another intrudes; your imagination is inflamed; and I need not refer to the consequences. You may have experienced the same adventure in your sleep. What share has your will had in all these modifications of sensation? The same that it has had in the coursing of your blood through your arteries and veins, in the action of your lymphatic vessels, or in the pulsation of your heart, or of your brain. I have read the article on "Dreams" in the "Encyclopædia," and have understood nothing; and when I search after the cause of my ideas and actions, either in sleeping or waking, I am equally confounded. I know well, that a reasoner who would prove to me when I wake, and when I am neither mad nor intoxicated, that I am then an active agent, would but slightly embarrass me; but I should be still more embarrassed if I undertook to prove to him that when he slept he was passive and a pure automaton. Explain to me an animal who is a mere machine one-half of his life, and who changes his nature twice every twenty-four hours. SECTION II. _Letter on Dreams to the Editor of the Literary Gazette, August, 1764._ Gentlemen: All the objects of science are within your jurisdiction; allow chimeras to be so also. "_Nil sub sole novum_"--"nothing new under the sun". Thus it is not of anything which passes in noonday that I am going to treat, but of that which takes place during the night. Be not alarmed; it is only with dreams that I concern myself.