DREAM AND REALITY. 99 



real rational — any more just than the others? It is doubtful if it is. 

 There are rare dreams in which everything proceeds in a regular and 

 natural way; and, on the other hand, reality is not always exempt 

 from capriciousness and improbability. But to me the capital objec- 

 tion to the distinction is that it is illusory, and the contrast be- 

 tween the disorder of dreams and the coherence of the real is only 

 apparent. The dream, it is true, appears disordered to us, but that 

 is when we are awake. An essential point which we always ignore 

 is that while we are dreaming everything seems simple and normal 

 and regular to us. We are not at all astonished at what happens. 

 We find it all right to be in two countries at the same time, and 

 we undersand very well how one person can be changed into an- 

 other. The conversations we have — those which are utterly un- 

 thinkable when we are awake — usually appear to us marvelously 

 lucid, and we admire the ease, the verve, and the luminous continu- 

 ity of our words. We enjoy that moving with so much suppleness 

 and precision among ideas; our demonstrations are infinitely con- 

 vincing; and it is perhaps in the dream that we have the most per- 

 fect sense of evidence. 



Everything, then, that passes in the dream is — to the dreamer — 

 as natural as events in the waking condition. When awake, events 

 seem, without exception, natural and regular; they also seem natural 

 and regular in the dream. It is true that we find them absurd when 

 we wake, but what of that? They are absurd only by comparison, 

 as looked at from the point of view of the waking man, who is 

 no longer the same that he was when dreaming. Who can tell if 

 we shall not awake some day from what we now call our waking 

 condition, and that we shall not then find the events absurd that we 

 now consider rational and real? Who can tell that we shall not be 

 stupefied at having been so firmly attached to invisible phantoms 

 and disordered combinations? 



In setting up a fourth distinction it is said that real life forms 

 a continuous whole, while dreams are not connected with one an- 

 other. The series of my days forms a single life, which holds to- 

 gether. I resume to-day my life of yesterday, and shall resume to- 

 morrow my life of to-day. While I am asleep, the course of it is 

 only suspended. I begin again in the morning at the very point 

 where I stopped in the evening. I find myself in the same medium, 

 occupied with the same thoughts, subject to the same cares, involved 

 in the same routine of events, the same storm of passions. The same 

 thread runs through it all. On the other hand, it is said, our dreams 

 do not form a consecutive existence. The dream of one night has 

 no connection with the dream of the previous night. On going to 

 sleep to-night I have no assurance that I shall find the landscapes 



