1892.] on the Physiology of Dreams. 587 



when they resigned themselves to rest. A limited few acquire so much 

 the habit of dreaming, they fail to distinguish between dreaminess and 

 wakefulness. They call themselves insomniacs, declare they never 

 sleep at all, and wonder why it is that after they have risen from what 

 they believe to be a perfectly sleepless night they are able next day, 

 improving hour by hour as the day progresses, to carry out their 

 ordinary labours and duties with fair activity ; as if, without knowing 

 it, they had slept, after all, in some part of their nervous organisa- 

 tion. 



In referring to these different classes of sleepers and dreamers, I 

 am bordering on the topic of causes of the phenomena of dreams, 

 about which it will be necessary to speak at some length. But it 

 will be most philosophical, before noticing causes, to dwell upon the 

 phenomena then) selves, the understanding of phenomena being ever 

 the true preliminary method of divining the cause or causes of them. 

 A grand field opens to me here. I might, for lecture upon lecture, 

 stand in this place reporting stories of dreams, stories written or 

 told by the dreamers themselves. Unfortunately recorded dreams 

 thought out and written out by their authors aie too suspicious, as a 

 general rule, to be accepted as reliable autliority. The most vivid 

 dreams and the most circumstantial are often the most fleeting, and 

 when the dream seems to be borne in the memory, recollection, 

 which is not the same as memory, fails to supply the true account. 

 The recollection of one memory commingles with other memories, 

 and the general tendency is to put together a mixture of dream and 

 fancy. Paul Richter in his narrative of a dream of the universe, 

 the most magnificent story of its kind ever told, affords illustration 

 of this fact. He had been thinking, he says, of the mighty space of 

 the universe, until, lost in the immensity of the contemplation, he 

 fell asleep and dreamed of an angel coming to him who, ordering 

 him to be stripped of his robes of flesh and divested of his gravitating 

 body, led him through the unfathomable abysses of space until he 

 cried, " Insufferable is the glory of God. Let me lie down and hide 

 myself from the infinite. Angel, I can bear it no longer." But this 

 is not the narrative of a simple dream of sleep ; it is the dream of 

 a poet touched with the most rt fined delicacy ; a picture drawn with 

 unmeasured care, conceived as celestial, and beyond the grasp of 

 any but of the imaginative scholar, who can make a new heaven and 

 a new earth out of the little sphere in which he lives ; the dream of 

 a constructive Ovid, singing a new and immortal song. 



The phenomena of dreams I have to present, though they lack 

 all fancy and are the most commonplace fact, have this advantage : 

 that they are scientifically valid. Throwing aside for my work of 

 observation all fancy, I determined, nearly half a century ago, to 

 make notes of such phenomena of dreams as should in my profes- 

 sional life be told to me while yet the phenomena were fresh in the 

 minds of those who experienced them. When 1 had, in this manner, 

 collected a goodly number of phenomena, I began to classify them, 



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