Dreams are very different from waking life, but it
is extremely difficult clearly to define in what the difference consists. When
we are dreaming, we are nearly always convinced that we are awake, and in some
cases real experiences have been mistaken from dreams. The latter mistake from
the subject of a celebrated Spanish play called life a Dream, and of an amusing
story in the Arabian Nights. In which a poor man is for a jest treated as a
mighty monarch, and it is contrived that he would afterwards think that all the
honorable treatment he had actually received was merely a vivid dream.
Sometimes even after waking. We may be doubtful whether our dream was a reality
or not, especially if we happen to fill asleep in our chair and do not remember
the circumstance of having fallen to sleep. Of course this doubt can only arise
when there has been nothing in our dream that seems impossible to our wakened
mind.
It is, however, only in rare cases that a dream
exactly copies the experience of our waking hours. As a rule, in our sleep all
kinds of events sierra to happen which in our waking hours were should know to
be impossible. In our dreams we see and converse with friends who are at the
other wide of the world or have been long dead. We ma even meet historical or
fictitious characters that we have read about in books. We often lose our
identity and dream that we are some one else, and in the course of a single
dream may be in turn several different persons. Space and time to the dreamer
lose their reality. It is possible in a dream that lasts a few seconds to
appear to have gone through the experience of many years. The limitations of
space may also vanish into nothing, so that we seem to travel the most distant
parts of the universe with the rapidity of thought.
Our imagination gains in some cases such complete
control over our reasons that we can contemplate all such contradictions to our
ordinary’ experience without the least feeling of wonder. But this is not
always the case. It is impossible to assert as a universal rule that in a dream
nothing, however extraordinary, can surprise us. Sometimes dreamers do have a
feeling of wonder at their storage experiences. Nor can we say that a moral
reason loses all control in our sleep. It does indeed sometimes happen that
good men in their dreams seem to do without the slightest compunction horribly
wicked deeds, but, on the other hand, even the dreamer sometimes hears the
voice of conscience.
The origin of dreams may in many cases be traced to
internal or external causes. Nightmare is frequently due to indigestion or
ill-health. When a dream is connected with an external cause, it is often
possible to trace some resemblance between the cause and the effect, although
our imagination erects a great dream fabric on a very small foundation.
Instances are quoted of a dreamer who dream that he was wandering through
regions of polar ice and woke up to find that he had kicked off his
bed-clothes; and of another who, going to sleep with a hot bottle at his feet,
dream that he was walking over the crater of a volcano. The sound of a whistle
heard at the moment of waking may make us dream of a long-continued struggle to
catch a railway train on the point of starting.
In other cases a dream originates in something that
the dreamer saw or was thinking about just before sleep came upon him.
Coleridge once fell asleep in his chair after reading how Kubla Khan ordered a
palace to be made. The idea worked upon his imagination, and the consequence
was that he composed a fine poem in his sleep. When he woke up, he remembered
perfectly the lines that had presented themselves to his mind in the form of a
dream, and he immediately began to write them down. Unfortunately, he was
interrupted in the middle of his task by a visitor, after whose departure he
could remember no more. So that the poem is only a fragment.
Not only the imagination but also the reasons has
been known to do good work in dreams. There are instances of mathematicians
solving in their sleep problems that they had vainly puzzled over when awake.
All the facts that we have been considering are so
various that they chiefly illustrate the extreme difficulty of making any
general statement about drams. They show that in many cases dream-life is very
different from real life, and that in other cases the mind of a sleeping man
works much in the same, way as if he were awake. Perhaps the only definite
general statement that can be made on the subject is that imagination even in
sleep cannot originate anything, although it has an almost unlimited power of
untiring together in more or less unusual or even in impossible combinations
that we have actually experienced.