416 NATURE AND NURTURE 



Doubtless, an African elephant or a dragon from the pit would 

 excite no greater interest or surprise than a rabbit in a new born 

 baby or in a beetle of any age. 



685. Probably our dream world resembles in great measure the 

 real world of a purely instinctive animal. In proportion to the 

 depth of our slumber, our memory, or some part of it, seems in 

 abeyance. We may " know sleeping thoughts at the moment they 

 arise, and not retain them the next moment." * As a medical man 

 I am frequently rung up at night, and, having formed the habit of 

 taking note, I observe that, invariably, I awaken out of a dream, 

 which I remember if I mentally record it without delay, but which 

 otherwise I forget almost immediately, especially if I am roused 

 out of very deep slumber. In lighter slumber, when I hover on 

 the borders of waking, memory also is more awake. It is then I 

 have my * vivid ' dreams, those I remember best. I think, there- 

 fore, that my mind as a whole never sleeps. In deepest sleep I 

 dream and weave the sensations that come to me from my body 

 into the fabric of my dreams. Of all my mind my memory alone 

 rests, more or less profoundly, when I sleep ; and, when I awake, it 

 is my memory that awakes. 



686. The main differences between our sleeping and waking 

 mental experiences arise from the fact that we are unable to store, 

 to profit from, the former. They are not retained in the memory 

 to anything like the same extent as the latter. Moreover, when 

 dreaming we refer to experiences recognized as past much less 

 than when awake. We live mainly in the immediate present, 

 accepting experiences, as they arise, without to any extent 

 consciously associating them with what has gone before. It is 

 thirty years since I studied for the Royal Engineers and more 

 than twenty since I sought to become a medical student. Never- 

 theless, occasionally I am still rendered miserable when asleep by 

 the thought that I may be * ploughed ' in Latin. All that has 

 happened between youth and middle age is quite forgotten. It is 

 true that the objects we see in our dreams have usually been stored 

 in our memories whence they are evoked ; but they do not come 

 to us surrounded, as it were, by a halo of recollections. They are 

 not usually greeted as remembered things. We feel that they are 

 good or bad, delightful or horrifying, just because they seem by 

 nature to be so, not because of the recollections with which they 

 are invested as if the physical characters in the brain with which 

 they are correlated had developed through the stimulus of 



5 Isaac Walton. 



