502 THE TREATMENT OF DISEASES. 



afterwards proved to be perfectly correct. The weak point in this case is that there ia 

 no evidence to show that the gentleman in question was really asleep when he wrote his 

 opinion. Circumstances that actually occur during the night are often mistaken for 

 dreams. A gentleman on getting up one morning fancied that he had dreamed of a 

 fire occurring in the vicinity of his house ; he mentioned the circumstance to his wife, 

 find to his surprise she informed him that the supposed dream was a reality, and that 

 he had got up to the window, looked at the fire, talked with her about it, and that in 

 fact he was at the time fully awake. 



It sometimes happens that circumstances long forgotten are recalled in our 

 dreams. A gentleman who had learnt Greek in his youth, but had subsequently 

 completely forgotten it, could in his dreams read the Greek works he had been 

 accustomed to use at college, and had a most vivid impression of fully understanding 

 them. It is related, too, of the Countess de Laval, a woman of perfect veracity and 

 good sense, that when ill she spoke during sleep a language which no one could 

 understand. At last an old nurse detected the dialect of Brittany; her mistress 

 had spent her childhood in that province, but had lost all recollection of the Breton 

 tongue, and could not understand a word of what she had said in her dreams when 

 it was repeated to her. Her utterances applied, moreover, exclusively to the ex- 

 periences of childhood, and were infantile in structure. Nothing can be more 

 remarkable than those cases in which a dream has served to reveal the hiding-place 

 of some long-lost document or family record. In many instances the circumstances 

 are well authenticated, and there can be no doubt as to their correctness. The facts 

 have been known and then completely forgotten, and have finally been recalled tc 

 memory during sleep, or possibly at the moment of awaking. 



Most people dream more or less, but, curiously enough, some never do so under 

 any circumstances, or rather, perhaps we should say that on awaking they have no 

 recollection of having done so. Even the ancient writers were aware of this fact, 

 and Pliny refers to men who never dreamed. Plutarch alludes to the case of 

 Cleon, who, although he lived to an advanced age, had never dreamed. Yet, in 

 spite of this, the great majority of writers hold the view that the brain is never at 

 rest. Sir William Hamilton caused himself to be aroused from sleep at intervals 

 throughout the night, and invariably found that he was disturbed from a dream, the 

 particulars of which he could always distinctly recollect. It is probable that we 

 originate nothing in our dreams. We may imagine things which never really 

 existed, or of which we have heard or read, but the images we make of them are 

 either composed of elements familiar to us, or are based upon ideal representations 

 which we have formed in our waking moments. For example, before the discovery 

 of America, no European ever dreamt of American Indians, simply because nothing 

 existed within his experience which could have afforded any idea of the appearance 

 of such people. Columbus and his followers may have dreamt of the continent of 

 which they were in search and of its inhabitants, but the images formed of the latter 

 must necessarily have resembled other beings they had seen or had heard described. 

 After the discovery, however, every one dreamt of Indians as a matter of course, 

 just as we do now even, although we may have no personal experience of the 

 denizens of the far West. Dreams always have some foundation, and in the great 



