98 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



What is true is that when we are once awake we change our point 

 of view, and our vision of the night then seems to have been wholly 

 interior, solitary, and subjective. But, notwithstanding the com- 

 mon illusion, while we are dreaming affairs pass, to us, exactly as 

 when we are awake. It is true that in the waking state we find our- 

 selves mingled with other men, who perceive the same objects that we 

 do. Do we not sometimes dream that we are one of an audience 

 looking at a play? that we are talking with a friend, and exchange 

 views with him? and that we understand one another perfectly? 

 There is, therefore, in this aspect, not a difference but identity be- 

 tween the dream and the waking. The interior condition, the sen- 

 sation, the credence, are identical. The dreaming man believes, sees, 

 and feels himself in intercourse with his fellows, just as the man 

 awake believes, sees, and feels it. "When we wake, we discover our 

 mistake, but what of that? It does not prevent us from believing 

 completely in it while we are asleep. And this is the point; for, 

 after all, am I sure that I shall not awake some day from what I 

 now call my waking life? And who knows whether I shall not then 

 judge that I have been dreaming a solitary dream? It may be 

 added that the agreement of witnesses is not a decisive sign by which 

 to distinguish the reality from the dream. There are collective 

 hallucinations. 



We come now to a more important difference, which includes the 

 principle and has a characteristic apparently essentially distinguish- 

 ing the dream — its looseness, disorder, inconstancy, and incoherence. 

 In the dream visions succeed one another without connection; no 

 law determines their order; an unrestricted fancy reigns among 

 them, and the normal is broken up in them at every point. We are 

 transported instantaneously from one country to another. We 

 pass without transition from childhood to age, and causes have the 

 strangest effects. The most essential laws of thought are constantly 

 violated. There are facts without any causes, metamorphoses, magical 

 disappearances. Even the absurd is realized, and the " principle of 

 contradiction " does not seem to be any more respected than the 

 others. We are at the same time in two places; we pronounce 

 words, we hold conversations of which we can not when we wake 

 recover the thread, so strange is their logic, so fugitive the sense, 

 and so fanciful the combination. A practiced psychologist, M. Del- 

 bceuf, succeeded in taking down in the morning the last phrase of 

 a book which he had been reading in a dream, and which had seemed 

 then remarkably lucid. Here it is : " The man raised by the woman 

 and separated by aberrations pushes facts disengaged by the analysis 

 of the tertiary nature into the way of progress." 



Is this distinction, then — that the dream is incoherent and the 



