DREAMS AND THE MAKING OF DREAMS. 463 



his apparatus of motion rests and doubtless sleeps while his mental 

 faculties are in full action. It may happen that the development of 

 this habit of separate sleep is carried to such an extent that the several 

 centei*s of the brain habitually take their rest independently of each 

 other, and at different times. The clerk will doze as he adds up his 

 column of figures ; and the copyist will go on transcribing while his 

 centers of thought and imagination sleep. Conversely, the lower and 

 automatic centers of the brain the senses may sleep while the high- 

 er centers are awake. Much of the so-called " abstraction " and " ab- 

 sence " of mind we notice in ourselves and others is due to this cause. 

 The brain-worker gains credit for being lost in thought when he does 

 not perceive some object which ought to impress him strongly through 

 one or more of the senses ; the farmer toiling over his fields, the hunt- 

 ing-man weary with his day's work, the soldier exhausted by the toil 

 of the march, will sleep so far as one set of faculties, or one part or 

 system of the organism, is concerned, while the others are not only 

 active, but so controlled that the subject of this partial sleep may walk 

 or ride or go through evolutions w T hile his mind sleeps. In short, it is 

 possible, and easy, to fall into any habit of this class, and the inevita- 

 ble consequence will be that only some of the faculties, or parts of the 

 organism, are ready to sleep when night comes round, while those 

 which remain awake will be unrestful and disturb the others so that 

 they can only doze. In this state of matters, dreaming is an una- 

 voidable experience. Meanwhile, the most highly developed and dra- 

 matic dreams occur to those wdiose sleep is so partial that part only 

 and, as it would often seem, a small part of the brain sleeps at any 

 time ; or, perhaps, I ought to say, at night because it not unfre- 

 quently happens that those who dream much by night do not dream 

 when they sleep by day. This variety of partial sleep, which tends to 

 sever the natural connections between the several component parts of 

 the mind, is injurious, and therefore it is, as I have remarked incident- 

 ally above, that great dreamers are, as a rule, unhealthy. It is easy 

 to see how this must be. If the intellectual faculties are, so to say, 

 broken up in such a way that when some are active the others are 

 sleeping, the checks and restraints which the several parts of the mind 

 naturally impose on each other are wanting, and any one of the facul- 

 ties may become exaggerated in the exercise of its functions. The 

 practice of dreaming will then extend to the day, and the mind may 

 especially if there be any inherited and constitutional lack of cohesion 

 among the intellectual faculties become disorganized. This is a con- 

 tingency, or more than a contingency let us say, a probability 

 against which the dreamer of particularly " worked-up " or realistic and 

 elaborate dreams should be on his guard. It does not, however, fol- 

 low from what I have said that the most coherent dreams are the worst, 

 because the judgment may be simply dozing, and able to correct the 

 scene or story as it passes through the mind. In that case, the sever- 



