It is said that musicians are very prone to the composition of music in dream. It was thus that Tartini wrote the Devil’s Sonata. The most unmusical are often haunted by scraps of tune that no effort will banish. Airs are composed in dream which are remembered upon waking. Perhaps it is not that music is more the subject of dream than other mental creations, but it is the most capable of being retained by the mind and expressed after the dream has vanished. My own experience of this capacity of the dreaming mind has been to myself very surprising; but perhaps the like may have occurred to others, although not recorded. Some time ago I dreamed that I was present and heard as well as witnessed the performance of an entire opera of my own composing. The strange part of it was that I am not a musician and never composed a bar of music in my life. I have a bad musical ear and no musical memory. Yet did my utterly unmusical mind in the dream compose the whole of an opera in two acts, overture and all, with a full band and half a dozen characters, each acting his own part, and the stage, the scenery, machinery and decorations, as perfect as any I have ever beheld and enjoyed at Covent Garden. Certainly it was not a mere dream of a dream. What other solution is there than this—and it is sufficiently marvellous—that my mind, free to act without the incumbering trammels of the sleeping body and exercising its unfettered faculties far beyond their capacity in waking life, had made me a musician, a dramatist, an actor, a painter—for all these that mind was in the invention and performance of that dream? If that mind or Soul be nothing more than the material form, or a function of that form, how comes it that it is more active and that its faculties are more exalted when the body, of which it is said to be a part, is asleep? If the mind or soul be a part of the body, or, as the Materialists contend, a mere function of the body, it ought, according to all known laws of science, to be sleeping with the body, or at least its activity and capacity ought not to increase in proportion as the activity and capacity of the body decrease.
I have here used the term “Mind,” because it is familiar to the reader, and any other name would mislead by the prejudices that attach to it. But I must be understood as intending by that term the thing, whatever it be, which, in the Mechanism of Man, directs and controls it intelligently, whether it be called Soul or Mind, and if it be a distinct entity, as Psychology contends, or only the product of the material structure, as the Materialists assert. This, indeed, is the great problem of this age, to be solved, not by dogmatic assertions, but by scientific proof.
There are many other Phenomena of Dream of less interest or importance, the description of which would occupy many pages; but those above will suffice for the purposes of this monograph.
CHAPTER XI.
CONCLUSIONS.
This view of the Physiology and Psychology of the very familiar but very marvellous condition of Sleep and Dream seems to conduct the inquirer to some conclusions, whose importance and interest it would be impossible to exaggerate; for, if there be any truth in them, they point directly to revelations of the hidden structure of the Mechanism of Man, which have been taught as a dogma and accepted as a faith, but for the proof of which by science as a fact in nature evidence has hitherto been wanting.
The condition of Sleep indicates a dual structure—that mind and body are not one, as the Materialists teach; for when the body sleeps the mind is awake, and often the mind is more active and more able when it is thus partially released from the burden of the body.
In sleep the phenomena of dream exhibit this independence of the body yet more powerfully. The mind lives a life of its own, with its own measurements of time and space, so different from those to which it is limited by the material structure of the body.
Self-consciousness is preserved in dream while the mind is inventing a whole drama of events and persons, so that we contemplate the work of the mind as if it was something existing without. This proves that the contemplating consciousness is something other than the thing contemplated. The “I” that views and remembers the action of the brain (which is the material organ of the mind) cannot be the brain itself, nor the mind itself, but must be something distinct from either, although intimately associated with both.
That conscious and contemplating something is the thing—the entity—the “I”—the “You”—the being—the individual—which may be called “Soul” or “Spirit,” or by any other name, but which we intend to designate when we use those terms.