A monograph on sleep and dream: their physiology and psychology

by Edward W. Cox

The Reasoning Faculties are not asleep, for we argue, often rightly—only we reason upon wrong premisses. We accept the visions of the mind—the ideas presented to the Conscious Self—as being real and then we reason upon them rationally. What Lawyer has not often dreamed that he was addressing a logical legal argument to an approving Court and, when wakened, remembering and reviewing that argument, has found it to be without a flaw?

The Emotions are not extinguished when we dream. The presentation of imaginary incidents which, if they had been real, would have kindled the passions in waking life, rouse those self-same passions to equal if not to greater fury in dream. Nor is the passion fanciful. We do not merely dream that we are angry. Very real and hot anger is kindled by the fancy-born picture of the dream, as the reader will readily discover if he recalls the sensation that attends upon being awakened at the moment of irritation in a dream. It is with all the other passions and emotions as with anger. The incidents of a dream excite them as if those incidents were true. Wherefore? Because they appear to the mind to be true.

Thus by a process of exhaustion we may hope to arrive at some knowledge of the cause of the special characteristic of dream—that is to say, the absolute belief we have in its reality during its enactment. The inquiry cannot fail to throw a great light upon mental structure and upon the relationship of the mind to the body and to the external world.

The first fact we learn from observing the action of the mind, when thus severed from communication with the external world, is its perfect independence, its entire unconsciousness of its loss, its capacity to create a world for itself and live a life of its own. If such a condition could be imagined as a mind continuing to live in a dead body, we might find in this phenomenon of sleep how the mind could exist in the same state of activity as now, feel the same emotions of pleasure and of pain, and enjoy a life as real to itself, although imaginary in fact, as is the actual existence of any living man.

But it teaches a lesson yet more important. If the mind can thus live a life of its own when severed from the influences of the body by the paralysis of a section of the brain in sleep, is not the presumption strong that this something that does not sleep with the body, that preserves an individual consciousness, that has memory and a Will, can create a world of its own and live and act in it with entire belief in its reality and which has a perfect sense of pleasure and of pain, is not the material brain merely, but something other than brain and of which the brain hemispheres are only the material mechanism? If the Conscious Self lives and works thus when the body is dead to it in sleep, may it not well be—(nay, does it not suggest even a probability?)—that when permanent severance by death is substituted for the temporary severance by sleep, the same Conscious Self may continue to exist with other perceptive and receptive powers adapted to its changed conditions of being?

Why, then, are we in dream so credulous as to believe implicitly that whatever visions are presented to us by the busy fancy are realities? Why do we accept impossibilities and incongruities without a question of their truth and scarcely with a sense of surprise or wonder? We have seen that it is not because the reasoning faculties are asleep,—for often they are very active in dream.

Simply, it is because we accept as real and as having been sense-conveyed, and therefore as representing external objects, the ideas that are in fact created by the mind itself.

And wherefore do we thus accept them?

The answer throws a flood of light upon the Mechanism of Mind and the Mechanism of Man.

All our sensations are mental. Whether self-created within or brought from without by the senses, we are conscious only of the mental impression. That alone is real to us. That alone exists for us.