584 Dr. B. W. Bichardson [April 29, 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, April 29, 1892. 



Sir James Crichton-Browne, M.D. LL.D. F.E.S. Treasurer and 

 Vice-President, in the Chair. 



B. W. KicHARDSON, M.D. LL.D. F.R.S. M.B.I. 



The Physiology of Dreams. 



" We are such stuff 

 As dreams are made of, and our little life 

 Is rounded with a sleep." 



If we take the word " stufif" as meaning our bodies living and moving 

 in what we consider the activity of consciousness, and if we consider 

 sleep as resembling the infinite repose of the space through which we 

 are being carried by the planet, then truly the great poet is right to 

 the letter. Every one of us is dreaming now. Between that which we 

 are now doing and that which we are doing when we are said to dream 

 in sleep there is this simple difference only, if it be a difference, that 

 in the present or wakeful state the will directs or moves with the 

 phantasy, and that in the dream of sleep the will is passive, neither 

 suggesting nor directing the course of the story. 



There is a romance about dreams in sleep ; and whoever — poet, 

 novelist, historian, philosopher — would investigate the iufluence of 

 dreams of sleep on dreams of wakefulness would find subject matter 

 for a life of labour. Some of the mightiest events in the whole of 

 human life, some of the most persistent, have had their origin in the 

 shortest of involuntary, sleeping dreams. Men do not seem to will 

 dreams ; dreams come without will, that is to say without being willed 

 consciously, therefore they are dreams ; but having come, they do not 

 necessarily pass away when the conscious will returns into activity. 

 Some dreams do — and this is fortimate — but all do not, and it is 

 because some come without being summoned and remain afterwards 

 that they are a mystery. For this reason they were ghostly mes- 

 sengers to the larger part of mankind in days of simple life, when 

 science had no presence, no explanatory reason. Why should dreams 

 come if they are neither wanted, expected, nor called ? They 

 must be provoked by messengers unseen and to the world at large 

 unknown. Little wonder that they should have played their 

 marvellous parts, and that, to fervid natures, immortal spirits, gods 

 themselves, should have spoken, as it has been assumed, to men in 

 dreams, when gods and sj^irits, formulated by the minds of men, were 

 accepted as firmly by belief as if they were veritable fact; as if 



