ioo POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



or the personages or the circumstances of my last dream. The most 

 diabolical nightmare may succeed a most delightful romance. In 

 short, not only is the form of the same dream incoherent, but our suc- 

 cessive dreams are incoherent as to one another. This was what 

 struck Pascal when he wrote : " If we dreamed the same dreams every 

 night, we should be affected by them as we are by things we see every 

 day; and if an artisan was sure to dream every night, for twelve 

 hours, that he was a king, I believe he would be nearly as happy as 

 a king who dreamed every night, for twelve hours, that he was an 

 artisan. . . . But because dreams are all different, and the same one 

 is so diversified, what we see in one affects us much less than what 

 we see when awake, because of the continuity of the waking life, 

 which is not so continuous and even, however, but that it changes, 

 too, though less abruptly, if only rarely, as when we travel ; and then 

 we say, ' It seems like a dream to me,' for life is a somewhat less 

 inconstant dream." 



What are we to say to this distinction? I do not believe it is 

 necessary to take it seriously, any more than the others. When is it 

 that we pass judgment on the discontinuity and incoherence be- 

 tween our successive dreams? Not while we are dreaming them. 

 When I am dreaming, I seem to be pursuing a life that has always 

 been the same. I have no sort of an impression that the present 

 dream has been preceded by different dreams having no connection 

 with it. I have, on the contrary, exactly as I have when awake, the 

 impression of an indefinite and single series of events, of an unroll- 

 ing of them without arrest and without break. There is, therefore, 

 on this point, no difference, but another resemblance between the 

 dream and the reality, and the same impression of continuity and 

 unity prevails in both. It is true that the aspect changes in waking, 

 and our several dreams then appear detached from one another. But 

 what of that? Are we sure that we shall not awake some day from 

 what we now call the waking state, and find then that that state, con- 

 tinuous in appearance, was in reality composed of a series of separate, 

 incoherent, and incongruous fragments? 



Thus we are all the time coming upon the same illusion. We 

 judge of the dream, not by what it is, but by what it seems to have 

 been after we have waked. Instead of observing the impressions of 

 the dreaming man while he is dreaming, we take notice of what he 

 thinks about them after he has waked up. This is to falsify the com- 

 parison of the normal and dream life by regarding the normal 

 life while we are in it, and the dream life when we have come 

 out of it. The several other difficulties on which psychologists have 

 insisted are capable of solution by the application of the same prin- 

 ciple: the seeming suspension of the will; the want of correspond- 



