A monograph on sleep and dream: their physiology and psychology

by Edward W. Cox

But by what faculty do we, in the waking state, distinguish between the self-created and the sense-borne ideas and impressions, so as to recognise the former as ideal and the latter as real?

For instance; you think of an absent friend, and you have in your mind a picture of him more or less accurate. You see your friend in person and then another picture of him is in your mind, brought to it by the sense of sight. Your perceptions of both are merely mental pictures. But, nevertheless, you readily distinguish them and call the mind-drawn image ideal and the sense-brought image real—meaning by these phrases that the former has no objective existence, but the latter is actually existing without you.

By what process is this result obtained? What enables you so to distinguish them?

It can only be that you are conscious of the action of the senses. You feel that your eye is employed in the process. You have learned by experience that the actual presence of an external object is only to be accepted when the information of it is brought to you by one of your senses.

Thus it is that, when we are awake, the senses correct the action of the mind and our capacity to distinguish the real from the ideal is due to the information given by the senses.

It is plain now why in dream we believe the ideal to be real. The senses being severed from the Mind by sleep, the Mind has lost the instrument by which it learns, when awake, what is shadow and what substance. As the necessary consequence, all ideas appear to it to be real because they are all alike. Inasmuch, then, as all the pictures that throng the mind were originally brought to it by the senses, it has no means, when an idea comes before it, of discerning whether it is a newly brought idea or only the revival of an idea already existing in itself. Hence it is that the Mind cannot but accept all its self-creations as realities and when these are combined in a connected drama, the whole is viewed by the Conscious Self as an actual adventure of the body, and not, as in the waking time it would have been viewed, as merely a creation of the busy fancy.

But the conclusion from this is that there is a Conscious Self, distinct from the brain action which it contemplates and criticises.

That in fact we have Souls.

Or rather that we are Souls, clothed with a molecular mechanism necessary for communication with the molecular part of creation, in which the present stage of being is to be passed.