THE ANALOGY OF DREAMS. 285 



■Tiave a sensuous presentation laying claim to reality, 

 and yet possessing only subjective validity. A 

 dream is a hallucination, and yet not a random 

 hallucination : each feature in the wildest dream is 

 causally connected with a reality transcending the 

 dream state (in this case our ordinary *' waking " 

 life), and when we awake we can generally account 

 even for its greatest absurdities. And yet those 

 absurdities do not, as a rule, strike us while we dream. 

 We live for the nonce in topsyturvydom, and are 

 surprised at nothing. While it lasts, therefore, a 

 dream has all the characteristics of reality. And so 

 with our present life : it seems real and rational, 

 [because we are yet asleep, because the eyes of the 

 soul are not yet opened to pierce the veil of illusion. 

 But if the rouorh touch of death awoke us from the 

 lethargy of life, and withdrew the veil that shrouded 

 from our sight the true nature of the cosmos, would 

 not our earth-life appear a dream, the hallucin- 

 ation of an evil nightmare ? 



Certainly the analogy holds very exactly. The 

 world of dreams is moulded, althougrh with strange 

 distortions, upon that of our waking life ; so is our 

 present world on that of ultimate reality. It is real 

 while it lasts ; so is our world ; when we awake, 

 both cease to be true, but not to be significant. 

 And both, moreover, may be seen through by reflec- 

 tion. Just as we are sometimes so struck by the 

 monstrous incongruity of our dreams that, even as 

 we dream, we are conscious that we dream, so 

 philosophy arouses us to a consciousness that the 

 phenomenal is not the real. 



But yet the parallel would not be complete unless 

 different people had parallel and corresponding 

 dreams or hallucinations. Exceptionally this cor- 



