PSYCHICAL ASPECT OF SLEEP.

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to dream would be to cease to live. Maine de Biran conceives that the soul sleeps, and that the senses are torpid. Jouffroy argues that the mind wakes, that certain of the senses transmit the sensations which they receive, and the mind awakes the senses by its own activity. Lelut controverts these opinions, and argues that there is neither suspension nor vigilance, but repose. Dugald Stewart, while holding uninterrupted psychical action, affirmed that the activity and volition of the spirit were suspended. Euler believed that the more the influence of the senses is suspended, the more regular and connected our dreams. He does not carry this theory so far as Democritus, who put his eyes out in order that he might philosophize the better; or as Malebranche, who closed the shutters and excluded every ray of light, that he might think more intensely; or, as St. Anthony, who complained that the rising sun deprived him of the 'greater interior light.'

"Müller thought sleep the antagonism of the organic and animal functions. Burdach calls sleep the primordial state of the soul, where it finds itself when it awakes to life. Maury compares the condition of the sleeping man to that of the foetus; and Macario, while admitting that dreams between sleeping and waking have demonstrated that the exercise of the faculties is not entirely suspended, designates sleep as the negation of the integrity of the moral and intellectual life."-Medical Critic and Psychological Journal, vol. ii., April, 1862.

CLARENCE'S DREAM.

"Shakespeare is almost always true to nature, and is so most particularly in Clarence's dream of Richard III. It is a dream of drowning, not the reality; hence the phenomena are described as those of the incubus, because the conservative instinct is aroused. Still there is the dreaming similarity between the reality and the illusion kept up with admirable

tact and truth to nature. Clarence is in prison, and dreams

Methought that I had broken from the tower,

And was embarked to cross to Burgundy;

And in my company, my brother Glo'ster,

Who from my cabin tempted me to walk

Upon the hatches; hence we look'd toward England,
And cited up a thousand heavy times,
During the wars of York and Lancaster,
That had befallen us. As we paced along

Upon the giddy footing of the hatches,

Methought that Glo'ster stumbled; and in falling,
Struck me, that thought to stay him, overboard
Into the tumbling billows of the main.

O Lord! methought what pain it was to drown!
What dreadful noise of water in mine ears!
What sights of ugly death within mine eyes!
Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks,
A thousand men that fishes gnawed upon;
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,

All scattered at the bottom of the sea.

"Then when Brackenbury asked him if he were not awakened 'with this sore agony,' Clarence replies-and herein Shakespeare shows his matchless art and powers of observation-in terms which indicate that there was the act of memory, like that described above, but dream-like, and not tinged with pleasure, but with pain, such as must necessarily attend the incubus in all its forms :

Oh no! my dream was lengthened after life;
Oh then began the tempest of my soul!
I passed, methought, the melancholy flood,
With that grim ferryman which poets write of,
Unto the kingdom of perpetual night.

The first that there did greet my stranger soul
Was my great father-in-law-renowned Warwick,
Who cried aloud, "What scourge for perjury
Can this dark monarchy afford fulse Clarence?"

POSSIBILITY OF OMNISCIENCE.

And so he vanished. Then came wandering by,
A shadow like an angel, with bright hair
Dabbled in blood, and he shrieked out aloud-
"Clarence is come-false, fleeting, perjured Clarence-
That stabbed me in the field by Tewkesbury;
Seize on him, furies! take him to your torments!"
With that, methought a legion of foul fiends
Environed me, and howled in mine ears
Such hideous cries, that with the very noise
I, trembling, waked; and, for a season after,
Could not believe but what I was in hell;

Such terrible impression made my dream.

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"This whole description is true to nature, even to the last line. The impressions of a vivid dream often dwell in the mind for some time after waking, and leave the individual in doubt whether they are phantoms or realities.

"This recall of past events to the memory in dreams and in morbid conditions of the brain, is a singularly suggestive fact. It indicates the power of mind, in the abstract, to comprehend, with a faculty little short of omniscience, the meaning and significance of those minute mysterious changes in the material organ which constitute the basis of dreams. It indicates, also, the immense capabilities of matter, in being rendered subservient to such remarkable spiritual phenomena. But when we pass from the creature to the Creator,-when we contemplate the endowments of the Supreme Mind, of 'the Father of the spirits of all flesh,' as manifested in his offspring,-we find that we can almost understand how, just as the physical changes in the material organ, passing through their phases, in one moment reveal the doings of years, so also the doings of all created things, past and present, may be revealed to the glance of the Infinite, in virtue of the minute physical changes his will directs; and so we get a glimpse at the possibility of Omniscience.

"On the other hand, the mind is struck with wonder, at the singular powers with which creative mind has endowed matter.

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GRAND INEXPLICABILITY.

The microscopic-the infinitely minute-changes which it passes through in acts of thought, and especially in the acts of memory we have described, are more utterly beyond our comprehension, and, indeed, more grand, because more inexplicable, than the vast changes in the relations of the masses which roll through infinite space in 'cycle on epicycle.' They reveal to us phenomena belonging to matter when it is conjoined with, and the instrument of the mind, which alter and decompose all our ordinary ideas of its properties, to the development of entirely new conceptions."-The Journal of Psychological Medicine: Sleep, Dreaming and Insanity, vol. iv., Oct. 1851.

CHAPTER IX.

PHYSIOLOGY AND PATHOLOGY OF DREAMING.

DREAMS CAUSED BY DISTEMPERS.

THOMAS HOBBES.

"THE imaginations of them that sleep are those we call dreams; and these also (as all other imaginations) have been before, either totally or by parcels, in the sense.

And because

in sense the brain and nerves, which are the necessary organs of sense, are so benumbed in sleep as not easily to be moved by the action of external objects, there can happen no sleep, no imagination, and therefore no dream, but what proceeds from the agitation of the inward parts of a man's body; which inward parts, for the connection they have with the brain and other organs, when they be distempered, do keep the same in motion, whereby the imaginations there formerly made appear as if a man were waking. Saving that the organs of sense being now benumbed so as there is no new object which can master and obscure them with a more vigorous impression, a dream must needs be more clear, in this silence of sense, than are our waking thoughts; and hence it cometh to pass that it is a hard matter, and by many thought impossible, to distinguish exactly between sense and dreaming. For my part, when I consider that in dreams I do not often, nor constantly think of the same persons, places, objects, and actions that I do waking, nor remember so long a train of coherent thoughts dreaming as at other times, and