402 MAUEY ON SLEEP AND DREAMS. 



chronology of the night is generally an obscure one ; 

 but this particular fact is easily tested, especially in the 

 broken dreams of the morning hours. It proves that 

 the period of a few minutes may include a whole story 

 of incidents, in which the perceptions of place, time, 

 and persons are removed from the outer world into 

 those of the little world within. This may seem strange 

 to the unobservant of themselves, but it will not so 

 seem to any who are capable of examining with care 

 the sequence of their waking thoughts. We live, the 

 mind lives, in a constant series or succession of states, 

 each one having its own individuality and excluding 

 others, yet linked together by a mechanism which we 

 vainly seek to interpret. v No one without close exami- 

 nation can conceive the multitude of these sequent 

 states which may be, and actually are, crowded into 

 short spaces of. time ever liable, indeed, to be inter- 

 rupted by causes from without and within, and merging 

 into new series, which in their continuous succession 

 form the totality of our mental life. Of the internal 

 causes acting on these series, the Will is that most im- 

 portant often, indeed, a slave to vagrant habits of 

 thought, but capable of becoming their master. The 

 highest faculty of man, intellectual and moral, lies in 

 the power of controlling and guiding them in their 

 passage through the mind ; so directing them as to en- 

 noble the character of thought itself, and the acts 

 derived from it. 



Without pursuing this subject, instructive though it 

 be as a method of mental analysis, we proceed to ano- 

 ther chapter in the History of Dreams, embodied in 



