busy brain in a kind of artificial apoplexy, have
had themselves whirled about on a millstone,
with their heads inclining outward, so that the
blood being thrown from all parts upward, to
the great workshop of the mind, flooded it, and
washed out the wakefulness. Opium, morphine,
counting to a hundred (doubtful), hop-pillows,
fancying you see your own breath (very doubtful),
draughts of heavy drink at bedtime, gin,
punch, and other night-caps, have all the same
intention as the mill-stone: namely, to deaden
the brain, and bring it to a regular pulsation.

Yet too heavy sleep is nearly as unhealthy
as, and is, perhaps, more unhealthy than, a
considerable degree of habitual sleeplessness.
It may be questioned if they who boast that
they find themselves, after eight hours' sleep,
just where they first lay down, in bed, without
even turning round, and certainly without dreaming,
are not short-necked and apoplectic. Yet,
on the other hand, horrible, perplexing, fatiguing
dreams are, in themselves, a disease.

I saw, in my far-gone days, two wonderful
bachelor brothers (twins, I think they were),
who, like Hamlet, had "bad dreams." Yet,
only to look at them, you saw at once the men
were good, honest, wiry, simple-hearted, old
hunting squires, of some four thousand a year
each. They did not drink mightily — at least I
think they did not; they chased lustily, I
know. Yet I heard, with my own (then)
boyish ears, the driest, tallest, and thinnest one
say, that he and his brother were so harassed by
horrible dreams that they both slept in
contiguous apartments, with nothing but an open
door between them, on the firm mutual compact
that the moment one should hear the other groan
in his sleep, that one should jump out of bed, and
give the groaner a good shaking to call him back
from his world of agony.

"But do you not, by this, get very little sleep
and refreshment?" asked my father of the narrator.

"Perhaps," replied the wiry brother; "but
the dreams fatigue us a great deal more than
lying awake all night would do."

I am a great dreamer, and dreams (not quite
so bad as the squires') make a vast part of the
life of multitudes of mankind.

What, then, are dreams?

I would answer in brief: Dreams are a
combination of imperfect sensation with imperfect
thought.

Most of their phenomena seem to be brought
about by what a watchmaker would call the
duplex movement in man— namely, of mind and
matter— and are only what might be expected
of a living substance that requires rest, and a
living soul that demands activity. The mind,
always sympathising, more or less, with the
body, gets lazy with the body's sleep, and can
no longer exercise her functions clearly; yet
still she makes a faint struggle to exercise them;
continues to invent when she can no longer
perceive; executes her dance though in manacles
(sometimes glittering, sometimes gloomy ones);
and even, when the sleep is light and imperfect,
endeavours to correct the errors of her clouded
perceptions.

"Does the mind always think?" asks Locke;
and, rashly as it seems to me, concludes from
our frequent non-remembrance of dreams, that
the question should be resolved in the negative.
But how frequently we think we have passed a
dreamless night, and yet, in the course of the
ensuing day, some little circumstance shall
suddenly cry, "Open, Sesame!" to the brain:
the key turns in the door of the closet to
which the mind has consigned her vagaries,
and we find, duly ticketed and labelled, a long
and perhaps strange dream, which, but for that
touch of kindred circumstance, we should never
have remembered. The mind, then, may always
think, though its thinking may not always leave
a durable impression on the brain.

But there are persons who scarcely can
be said to have minds, and who never think
to any purpose. The error of philosophers
is to judge all phenomena by their own
philosophic consciousness. "Cogito, ergo sum,"
was the dictum of a philosopher. "Non
cogito, ergo non sum," might be the equally
good reasoning of a very dull man. Could we
take a peep at some slumbering mass of
mortality, whose brains are in his stomach, whose
snore imitates the grunt of a swine, we should
decidedly say, "The mind does not always
think." From such a one we should have no
right to expect dreams or dream-phenomena.
Dreams! he never dreams by night, simply
because he never thinks by day. But I think I
may assert, of those who know they are alive,
that there is a vital consciousness running
through even dreamless slumber, which is very
different from the senselessness of a swoon.

Dreaming is natural. Animals dream. The
old dear greyhound, Transit, in my paternal
home, used to move his legs on the rug by the
fire as if he were coursing. My little Skye
terrier faintly barks in his sleep, chasing, doubtless,
an imaginary cat the only game he knows,
poor town-bred fellow!

Dryden says, I suppose on the authority of
experience,

       The little birds in dreams their songs repeat.

The phenomena of dreaming so puzzled
an essayist on sleep, that he invented a theory
about them, which he declared could alone solve
their difficulties. This writer (whose name I
forget, but whose work I read long since)
affirmed boldly that all our dreams were
caused by external agency, since to external
agency they were often apparently due. He
invented a troop of small familiar spirits.
They were the external agency. "Would
the soul," he asked, "torment herself in sleep
by horrible creations? Could the soul play
the wires of such a multitude of personages
as peopled her visions?" The reasoning is
shallow. Man, when awake, often torments
himself with disagreeable thoughts. Indigestion,
to say nothing of conscience, will create
hypochondriac horrors to any amount: a too full
blood throbbing through the brain will people