Sovereign Queen Victoria.  Awful to relate, that
amiable lady, whom I have but casually seen
from afar, is, in my dream, amazingly in love with
me.  It seems, according to the dream, that I met
her Majesty, when she was walking all by herself
in a wood. There and then the mutual attraction
(I hope it is not traitorous to record that it is
mutual) began, and I always, in a new dream of
the kind, recur to the first meeting, and
then to each successive meeting.  In each new
dream I am agitated with all sorts of hopes
and fears. Will the Queen deign to
remember me?  Shall I have an interview with
her?  Sometimes I have the interview:
sometimes I only see my beloved lady from a
distance. On all these occasions I am tormented
by an idea that Prince Albert is jealous of me.
Sometimes I am at a grand royal fête, which
sometimes takes place in a palace, sometimes in
an island.  Numbers of persons are at the fête,
and, on these occasions, Prince Albert appears,
and does me the honour to be remarkably jealous.

Another persistent dream, more curious, was
related to me by a friend:

A young unmarried lady of his acquaintance
has a most pertinacious dream about a child
which she is forced to take care of.  All her
anxiety in her dream is—not about herself, but
about this child, which is a very troublesome
child, and is always falling down precipices, or
tumbling into ditches, or getting into the way
of mad bulls. The tormenting child, so
constantly recurring in the young lady's dreams,
has sometimes so worried her that she has felt
quite tired by day from watching the child
through its perils in the night.

These remarks upon sleep and dreams are
connected with our subject thus:

I would show that, in a sleeping state, we are
so much in the condition of the cow in the
water, which, according to the riddle, is like
nothing so much as a cow out of the water, as
only to vary from our own natural selves in as
far as we rest instead of act; that, the restful
condition of the brain and body account for
most of the phenomena of sleep; that, the more
or less of conscious action of the brain explains
dreams for the most part; that, dreams, briefly,
are imperfect sensation noted by imperfect
thought; that, consequently, there is no ground
for supposing that impressions, conveyed from
the sensorium of another person to our own, will
be more frequent in sleep than in the time of
waking; nay, rather, that there is reason to
suppose they will be less frequent in sleep than
in the time of waking, because the mind, in
sleep, is more self-concentrated than in any
other of her states, consequently less liable to
be acted upon from without.

All this contradicts, no doubt, the old notion
of dreams being especially set apart for wonderful
communications from above (or below), for
supernatural warnings, prophetic influences,
colloquies with the dead, and so forth. Doubtless,
they are an interesting part of our human
constitution; doubtless, they may serve as
scalpel-knives whereby to dissect certain waking
phenomena. But, is the sleeping, dreaming man
to be compared to the waking, thinking man?
Is life itself so poor a miracle as to need
dyspeptic visions to bolster it up? Are we so in
love with the abnormal, as to run away from the
full-grown offspring of our intellect to those
abortive babies of it which Shakespeare calls
"the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing
but vain phantasy"?

In accordance with this view of our subject,
I have far less to relate of thought-impressing
in sleep, than that which I have represented as
occurring in the waking state.  Perhaps one of
the most common proofs that one waking human
being can—notwithstanding what I have said to
the contrary—affect another human being while
he sleeps, is a phenomenon known to most
persons, and in everybody's power to convince
himself of. I allude to the uneasiness and
prompt waking of any sleeping person at whom
we may look intently.  How often, while I was
at college, have I gone to wake some tardy
friend, who was going with me to Newmarket
or elsewhere, and have tried the experiment by
a noiseless entry into his room, and by a fixed,
silent gaze at the supine and snoring sleeper!
People will answer questions in their sleep if
you hold their hands: a fact which seems to
prove the mind, in sleep, to be even intelligently
impressionable by some direct external agencies.

The first instances that I shall adduce of
thought-impressing in sleep, are mostly those
that occur in reference to persons with whom
we are in habitual relation or daily intimacy.

Let any one say whether he cannot call to
mind some such incident as the following.
Sitting at breakfast one morning with a married
couple, I heard the following dialogue, which, I
premise, did not occur during strawberry time.

Mr. B. "My dear, it is very odd that it
should just now come into my head, that I
dreamed last night you were holding out to me a
beautiful plate of strawberries."

Mrs. B. "How extraordinary!  You
remind me that I dreamed last night, in a very
vivid manner, that I brought you a plateful of the
largest and finest strawberries I had ever seen."

One night, I had a vivid impression in a
dream that a man-servant, who has lived with
me many years, was presenting me with some
strange object, that looked like a large screen,
over the whole of which was a curious scolloped
pattern. In my dream, I was immensely puzzled
to make out what it was that produced the
pattern: whether shells or marbles, or any other
variegated thing that would effect a tesselated
appearance. The next morning I said, laughing,
to my man, "John, what could it be that I
dreamed, last night, you were making me a
present of?  It was a sort of screen, with a pattern
on it—like this."  And I rapidly sketched with
a pencil on the back of a card (which I still
preserve) the pattern I had seen in my dream.

"Why," said John, looking blank, "then you
know all about it, sir? My wife, I suppose,
has been showing you the screen that we are
making for you.?"