AND BODILY STATES UPON THE IMAGINATION. 51 



divine, flourished and wrote, when Philosophy, though not clothed 

 with her present simplicity of beauty, had discarded the grotesque 

 and fanciful garb with which the schools had arrayed her, should 

 advance and endeavour to sustain an opinion which is equally whim- 

 sical and to the full as untrue. He supposed, likewise, in his book 

 entitled The World of Spirits , that spiritual beings were the active 

 agents, the abettors and supporters of all the extravagancies of the 

 sleeping dreamer. 



*' Dreams are nothing more than the media through which Ima- 

 gination unfolds the ample stores of her richly decorated empire; 

 and in proportion to the vigour of that faculty in any individual is 

 the luxuriance of the visions which pass before his eyes in sleep."* 



There are no limits to the extravagancies of those visions some- 

 times called into birth by the vivid exercise of Imagination. — 

 Contrasted with them, the wildest fictions of Rabelais^ Ariosto, or 

 Dante sink into absolute probabilities. *' I remember dreaming, 

 on one occasion," says the modern Pythagorean. " that I possessed 

 ubiquity, twenty resemblances of myself a])pearing in as many dif- 

 ferent places in the same room, and each being so thoroughly pos- 

 sessed by my own mind, that I could not ascertain which of them 

 was myself and which my resemblance." 



At another time, he dreamed that he was converted into a pillar 

 of stone, which reared its head in the midst of a desert, where it 

 stood for ages, till generation after generation melted away before 

 it. Even in this state, though unconscious of possessing organs of 

 sense or being anything else than a mass of lifeless stone, he saw 

 every object around — the mountains growing bald with age — the 

 forest trees drooping in decay ; and he heard whatever sounds na- 

 ture is in the habit of producing — such as the thunder peal breaking 

 over his naked head, the winds howling past him, or the ceaseless 

 murmur of streams. At last he also waxed old and began to crum- 

 ble into dust, whilst the moss and ivy accumulated upon him, and 

 stamped him with the aspect of hoar antiquity. In dreams, the 

 judgment is an absolute nullity ; it takes no cognizance of circum- 

 stance, but leaves them all at the disposal of the giddy fancy. One 

 of the most remarkable defects of judgment, in dreams, appears to 

 be the utter inability to appreciate, with the least possible approach 

 to truth, the lapse of time. Dr. Gregory mentions a gentleman 



* Macnish, op. cit. — These visions are not, however, altogether govern- 

 ed by the whim or caprice of the fancy ; but are regulated in the pleasing or 

 terrific shapes which they assume, by certain states of body and mind which 

 I shall presently more particularly allude to. 



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