My slumbers, if I slumber, are not sleep,
     But a continuance of enduring thought
     Which then I can resist not. In my heart
     There is a vigil; and these eyes
     But close to look within."

Contrition and remorse oppose his rest. If
we remember right, it was Bishop Newton,
who remarked that the sleep of innocence
differed essentially from the sleep of guilt.

The assistance supposed to be sometimes
furnished in sleep towards the solution of
problems which puzzled the waking sense, opens
up a curious subject of investigation. Cases
of the kind have been recorded upon undoubted
authority. Hence some philosophers, like Sir
Thomas Browne and Addison, have been
induced to suppose that the soul in this
state is partially disengaged from the
encumbrance of the body, and therefore more
intelligent, which is a mere fancy—a poetical
fiction. Surely it is absurd to suppose that
the soul, which we invest with such high and
perfect attributes, should commit such frivolous
and irrational acts as those which take
place so constantly in our dreams, "Me
thinks," observed Locke, "every drowsy nod
shakes this doctrine." All we remark, is,
that some of the ordinary mental faculties
act in such cases with increased energy.
But beyond this we cannot go. We are
informed by Cabains, that Franklin on several
occasions mentioned to him that he had been
assisted in his dreams on the issue of many
affairs in which he was engaged. So, also,
Condillac, while writing his "Cours d'Etudes"
states that he was frequently obliged to leave
a chapter incomplete, and retire to bed: and
that on waking, he found it, on more than one
occasion, finished in his head.  Condorcet
upon leaving his deep and complicated
calculations unfinished, after having retired to
rest, often found their results unfolded to
him in his dreams. Voltaire assures us that
he, like La Fontaine, composed verses
frequently in his sleep, which he remembered on
awaking. Doctor Johnson  states that he
once in a dream had a contest of wit with
some other person, and that he was very
much mortified by imagining that his
opponent had the better of him. Coleridge, in a
dream, composed the wild and beautiful poem
of "Kubla Khan," which was suggested to
him by a passage he was reading in
"Purchas's Pilgrimage " when he fell asleep. On
awaking he had a distinct recollection of the
whole, and, taking his pen, ink, and paper,
instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines
which have been so much admired.

One of the most striking circumstances
connected with the human mind is the
extreme lightning-like rapidity of its thoughts,
even, in our waking hours; but the
transactions which appear to take place in our
dreams are accomplished with still more
incalculable rapidity; the relations of space,
the duration of time, appear to be alike
annihilated; we are transported in an instant to
the most distant regions of the earth, and the
events of ages are condensed into the span of
a few seconds. The accidental jarring of a
door, or any noise, will, at the same moment
it awakens a person, suggest the incidents of
an entire dream. Hence some persons—Lord
Brougham in particular—have supposed that
all our dreams take place in the transition or
interval between sleep and waking. A gentleman
dreamt that he had enlisted as a soldier,
joined his regiment, deserted; was
apprehended, carried back, tried, condemned to be
shot, and, at last, led out for execution. After
all the usual preparations a gun was fired;
he awoke with the report, and found that a
noise in an adjoining room had, in the same
moment, produced the dream and awakened
him. The same want of any notion of the
duration of time occurs, more or less, in all dreams;
hence our ignorance when we awake of the
length of the night. A friend of Dr.
Abercrombie's dreamt that he crossed the Atlantic
and spent a fortnight in America. In
embarking, on his return, he fell into the sea,
and, awakening with the fright, discovered he
had not been ten minutes asleep. "I lately
dreamed," says Dr. Macnish, "that I made a
voyage—remained some days in Calcutta—
returned home—then took ship for Egypt,
where I visited the cataracts of the Nile,
Grand Cairo, and the Pyramids; and, to
crown the whole, had the honour of an
interview with Mahomet Ali, Cleopatra, and
Alexander the Great." All this was the work
of a single hour, or even a few minutes. In
one of the dreams which Mr. De Quincey
describes—when under the influence of opium
—"the sense of Space and in the end of Time
were," he states, "both powerfully affected.
Buildings, landscapes, &c., were exhibited in
proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted
to receive. Space swelled, and was amplified to
a sense of unutterable infinity. This, however,
did not disturb me so much as the vast
expansion of Time; I sometimes seemed to
have lived for seventy or one hundred years
in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings
representative of a millenium, passed in that
time; or, however, of a duration far beyond
the limits of any human experience". One of
the miracles of Mahomet appears to be
illustrative of the same phenomenon. We read,
in the Koran, that the angel Gabriel took
Mahomet, one morning, out of his bed to
give him a sight of all things in the Seven
Heavens and in Paradise; and, after holding
ninety thousand spiritual conferences, he was
brought back again to his bed; all which was
transacted in so small a space of time that
Mahomet, upon his return, found his bed still
warm.

Are dreams so much varied as is generally
supposed? Or, taking into consideration our
different mental and physical constitutions, is
there not rather a remarkable sameness in
them? It is certainly a very unusual
circumstance to hear of any dream that does