THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF. 735 



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our dreams — are the characteristics of the child, the savage, and the 

 madman. Time and space are annihilated, gravity is suspended, and 

 we are joyfully borne up in the air, as it were, in the arms of angels; 

 we are brought into a deeper communion with Nature, and in his 

 dreams a man will listen to the arguments of his dog with as little 

 surprise as Balaam heard the reproaches of his ass. The unexpected 

 limitations of our dream world, the exclusion of so many elements 

 which are present even unconsciously in waking life, imparts a splen- 

 did freedom and ease to the intellectual operations of the sleeping 

 mind, and an extravagant romance, a poignant tragedy, to our emo- 

 tions. " He has never known happiness," said Lamb, speaking out of 

 his own experience, " who has never been mad." And there are many 

 who taste in dreams a happiness they never know when awake. In 

 the waking moments of our complex civilized life we are ever in a 

 state of suspense which makes all great conclusions impossible; the 

 multiplicity of the facts of life, always present to consciousness, re- 

 strains the free play of logic (except for that happy dreamer, the 

 mathematician) and surrounds most of our pains and nearly all our 

 pleasures with infinite qualifications; we are tied down to a sober 

 tameness. In our dreams the fetters of civilization are loosened, and 

 we know the fearful joy of freedom. 



At the same time it is these characteristics which make dreams 

 a fit subject of serious study. It was not until the present century 

 that the psychological importance of the study of insanity was recog- 

 nized. So recent is the study of savage mind that the workers who 

 have laid its foundation are yet all living. The systematic investiga- 

 tion of children only began yesterday. To-day our dreams begin 

 to seem to us an allied subject of study, inasmuch as they reveal within 

 ourselves a means of entering sympathetically into ideas and emo- 

 tional attitudes belonging to narrow or ill-adjusted states of conscious- 

 ness which otherwise we are now unable to experience. And they 

 have this further value, that they show us how many abnormal phe- 

 nomena — possession, double consciousness, unconscious memory, and 

 so forth — which have often led the ignorant and unwary to many 

 strange conclusions, really have a simple explanation in the healthy 

 normal experience of all of us during sleep. Here, also, it is true 

 that we ourselves and our beliefs are to some extent " such stuff as 

 dreams are made of." 



The harmonious and equitable evolution of man, says President Dab- 

 ney, of the University of Tennessee, "does not mean that every man must 

 be educated just like his fellow. The harmony is within each individual. 

 That community is most highly educated in which each individual has 

 attained the maximum of his possibilities in the direction of his peculiar 

 talents and opportunities.'' 



