Homer says,—
"Our dreams descend from Jove."
That is, from the seat of intellect, and declare their import when our will sleeps. Then are they of weighty and reliable import, yet require the like suppression of our will to make plain their significance. Only so is the oracle made reliable. The good alone dream divinely. Our dreams are characteristic of our waking thoughts and states; we are never out of character; never quite another, even when fancy seeks to metamorphose us entirely. The Person is One in all the manifold phases of the Many through which we transmigrate, and we find ourself perpetually, because we cannot lose ourself personally in the mazes of the many. 'Tis the one soul in manifold shapes, ever the old friend of the mirror in other face, old and new, yet one in endless revolution and metamorphosis, suggesting a common relationship of forms at their base, with divergent types as these range wider and farther from their central archetype, including all concrete forms in nature, each returning into other, and departing therefrom in endless revolution.[14]
"I catch myself philosophizing most eloquently," wrote Thoreau, "when first returning to consciousness in the night or morning. I make the truest observations and distinctions then when the will is yet wholly asleep, and mind works like a machine without friction. I was conscious of having in my sleep transcended the limits of the individual, and made observations and carried on conversations which in my waking hours I can neither recall nor appreciate. As if, in sleep, our individual fell into the infinite mind, and at the moment of awakening we found ourselves on the confines of the latter. On awakening, we resume our enterprise, take up our bodies, and become limited minds again. We meet and converse with those bodies which we have previously animated. There is a moment in the dawn when the darkness of the night is dissipated, and before the exhalations of the day begin to rise, when we see all things more truly than at any other time. The light is more trustworthy, since our senses are pure and the atmosphere is less gross. By afternoon, all objects are seen in mirage."
All men are spiritualists in finer or coarser manners, as temperament and teaching dictate and determine,—the spiritual world revealing itself accordingly. Speculation has in all ages delighted itself in this preternatural realm from whence have risen the ghosts of realties too unsubstantial and fugitive for ordinary senses to apprehend. Whatever the facts, they receive interpretation according to the spirit and intelligence of the believer. The past is full of such prodigies and phenomena, for whose solution all learning, sacred and profane, is revived in its turn. It appears that like opinions have their rounds to run, like theories with their disciples, reappearing in all great crises of thought, and reaching a fuller solution at each succeeding period. A faith, were such possible, destitute of an element of preternaturalism, or of mysticism, pure or mixed, could not gain general acceptance. Some hold on the invisible connects the known with unknown, yet leaving the copula to be divined. We define it on our lips when we pronounce the word Person, and so approach, as near as we may, to the "I Am" of things.
Unseen our spirits move, are such,
So eager they to clasp, they feel, they touch
While yet our bodies linger, cannot speed
The distance that divides, confines their need.
[14.] The seeming miracle and mystery of the mesmeric, or clairvoyant vivacity, is best explained by conceiving the instreaming force of the operator driving the magnetic current from cerebrum to the cerebellum of his victim, and there, while under the pressure, reporting the operator's sensations and thoughts through the common brain of both. And this view is confirmed by the further fact that under this dominating force the domain of memory is the more deeply searched, and things revealed which, separate and alone, left unaided by such agencies, neither could have divined. It is like one's adding a double brain to his own, and subsidizing it the while to serve his particular ends.