286 STUDIES IN LIFE AND SENSE. 



ganglia appear to possess the direct function of converting intellectual 

 operations into automatic actions. Thus the musical composition 

 which at first requires the concentrated effort of mind to master 

 it, may in a few days be " played off." The latter accomplishment is 

 due to the " central ganglia," which, acting as private secretaries to 

 the purely intellectual (and frontal) portion of the brain, have repro- 

 duced automatically what at first was an intellectual act and one 

 demanding an exercise of attention and mental effort. The action 

 of these ganglia in the production of dreams and somnambulism is 

 readily understood, when we thus become aware of the facts that all 

 parts of the brain do not possess the same intellectual value, and that 

 these central masses are capable of forming reproductions and imita- 

 tions of our waking lives, during the hours of sleep. In sleep, or it 

 may be in illness or after injury, these lower brain-centres, in a word, 

 assume the functions of higher centres, and play strange pranks with 

 the rational slumbering existence, or with the waking but abnormal 

 life of the diseased brain. 



Various distinguished writers remarking on the phenomena of 

 dreaming agree in affirming that the thoughts of our sleeping hours 

 must invariably bear some defined relation to the antecedent thoughts 

 and events of our lives it may be to the acts of the previous day ; 

 or, on the other hand, to ideas separated from our last waking 

 moments by an interval whose years make up the best part of a life's 

 duration. To say that dreams may deal with subjects of which we 

 have never had any knowledge whatever is to suggest the indefen- 

 sible proposition that we can and do remember all the events and 

 ideas which have occurred and been present with us during our 

 entire existence, or, in one word, that memory is practically omni- 

 scient and infallible ; whilst against the idea just noted we must 

 place the opposing thought, that the brain's action being largely 

 unconscious in the common operations of receiving, and certainly in 

 those of registering and preserving, impressions, it is more logical to 

 conclude that dreams usually represent images and conceptions of 

 material things these material ideas or events being often indis- 

 tinctly presented, frequently altered and transmogrified in their re- 

 production, and commonly projected within the range of our night- 

 thoughts in a fashion which may defy our recognition and compari- 

 son of them as parts of the waking-life of former days. There is no 

 lack of proof from many sides of the extreme probability that these 

 assumptions represent the whole or the greater part of the truth about 

 dreams. That the event suggesting a dream is one which may cause 

 us some trouble in identifying it with our distorted visions is easy of 

 proof from the side of practical experience. Impressions on some 

 special sense will produce very characteristic dreams, the origin of 

 which may take such trouble in its determination that we might well 



