The process is worthy of note. You are engaged in some occupation—say that you are reading a novel. You “feel sleepy;” your eyes continue to pass over the page; your mind pictures the persons, actions and emotions of the story. But by degrees the ideas become dim and shadowy and the attention flags. Then your mind wanders away to other scenes and persons, which come into it uncalled for and even against your Will. But the power of that Will is lessening also. At first it is strong to banish the intruding thoughts; but as “the attention” relaxes more and more, so more and more does your Will cease to control the now thick-coming fancies. In that incipient stage of dream you know that these dream-pictures are only dreams. Never do you mistake them for realities. Soon the influence of sleep steals over the mind. The eyelids close and exclude the impressions of the external world that are made through the sense of sight. The other senses are paralyzed also. The creations of the brain take full possession of the mind. You are now asleep and dreaming.
If the condition of dream were not so familiar—if it did not occur to all of us, but only to some few persons in abnormal conditions, it would appear to the whole world as very wonderful. Suppose that dreaming were a faculty possessed only by persons of a certain constitution; that a Dreamer had told you how, when he was asleep, he saw and conversed with the dead, beheld distant places, lived another life, walked upon water, flew through the air, performed impossibilities, felt passions and sentiments and exercised intellectual powers far exceeding those of his waking life, should we not say of him that he was a madman or an impostor? Would he not be prosecuted by the high priests of physical science as a rogue and vagabond, and sent to prison by the Scientists or to an asylum by the Doctors?
But because all of us do these things nightly the wonder of them does not strike us. We do not pause to think how great the marvel is, nor how it comes to be. May I venture to hope that the reader will be induced to look upon this marvellous mental phenomenon with some curiosity and hereafter to recognise in the phenomena of dream, not only something to awaken curiosity, but something to command his serious attention, as being peculiarly fitted to reveal to the inquirer some of the mysteries of Mind, its structure, its faculties, the manner of its action. The phenomena of Dream open to us the path by which we may hope to make the first advances into the science of Psychology, for they are facts known to all, disputed by none and which even the Materialists cannot deny. Happily, neither their vocabulary of abuse, nor their weapons of prosecution and persecution, can be directed against those who investigate the phenomena of dream. Their existence cannot be denied, nor can they be explained by attributing them to imposture.
How comes this transformation from sanity to insanity, wrought in a moment, when Sleep has closed upon the Mind the portals of the senses and left it almost isolated from the real material external world to revel in its own imaginary world?
Some rein that held the mind in check when awake has certainly been taken from it at the instant sleep occurs.
What is that lost rein—that paralyzed power?
It is not Consciousness. We do not lose our individuality in dream. Never does the dreamer suppose himself to be another person. He may dream that he has assumed other characters, that he is a king, or a beggar, but still it is himself who has become a king and is acting king.
Nor is the Will absent. The dreaming mind is conscious of the exercise of its Will and believes that its commands are obeyed. But the Will is powerless to compel action. Its commands are not obeyed. In dream we will to speak, to run, to do what the body does freely when in our waking state we will to do. We will in dream as we will when awake, but the mechanism of the nerves that move the body refuses to obey the mandate of the Will however strenuously exerted.
Imagination, on the other hand, is even more lively in dream than in our waking time.