THE BORDERLAND OF SCIENCE. 



although I had a perfectly clear remembrance of their 

 tenour on first waking,* they had passed altogether 

 from my recollection the next morning. It is to be 

 noted, however, that I was under the influence of 

 sorrowful dreams when I awoke. At this time the light 

 of a waning moon was shining into the room. I opened 

 my eyes, and saw, without surprise or any conscious 

 feeling of fear, my mother standing at the foot of the 

 bed. She was not c in her habit as she lived,' but 

 'clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful.' Her 

 face was pale, though not with the pallor of life ; 

 her expression sorrowful, and tears which glistened in 

 the moonlight stood in her eyes. And now a strange 

 mental condition followed. My reason told me that I 

 was deceived by appearances ; that the figure I saw 



* One of the most singular facts connected with the condition of the 

 brain during and directly after sleep, is this, that although on waking 

 one may recollect every circumstance of a dream, and even go carefully 

 over the events of the dream with the express object of impressing 

 them on the mind, yet if one sleeps again the whole seems, on our 

 next waking, to have vanished completely from the memory. One can 

 barely remember the circumstance that there had been the desire to 

 retain the recollection of the dream. I doubt even whether this is not 

 generally forgotten ; so that in fact in most cases, there is nothing to 

 recall either the dream or the first waking thoughts concerning it. 

 There is a story of a person who solved a mathematical problem in his 

 sleep, and found the solution written out on his desk, yet had no recol- 

 lection of having left his bed for the purpose. Something similar once 

 occurred to myself ; but I could just recall the circumstance that I had 

 got up to put on paper the ideas which had occurred to me in sleep. I 

 wish I could make the story complete by saying the solution was sin- 

 gularly ingenious, and so on ; but truth compels me to admit that it 

 was utter rubbish. I could not have been in the full possession of my 

 faculties though seemingly wide awake when I wrote it out as some- 

 thing worth remembering. 



