personal experience—does not go the length, when
it is lazily busy in dreams, of picturing death:
which would cost it a considerable amount of
trouble.  I am sorry so to explain that absence
of the idea of death, in dreams, which might pass
for an intimation of man's immortality; but the
destruction of our fancies is recompensed by a
sense of law, and, in fact, the inability we have,
when waking, to conceive of the state called
death, is just as much a proof of the indestructible
nature of mind, as the absence from our
dreams of the dead, as dead.

For something of the same reason, I imagine,
we go back, in dreams, to days when things
were newest to our experience, and, therefore,
made the strongest impression on our minds. The
true marvel is in the retentiveness of impressions
in the brain itself.  Sleep has no mystery so
wonderful as this vital fact. The brain, which
is mere matter, serum, adipose, and what not, is
evidently capable of retaining, and, if of retaining,
of laying by in actual form and figure, every
impression that has ever been made upon it.

Dreams of school-days and college-days are
generally agreeable dreams with me, though I
confess that my having to get up a Latin lesson
sometimes perplexes me, even with a sense of
incongruity; and, if I am particularly self-conscious
in sleep, I do then ask myself occasionally,
"Am I not a little old for this sort of thing?"
However, the fresh feeling of youth and young
companionship, is with me in these dreams
generally the predominant feeling.

I am sure that the mind takes no pleasure in
troubling or alarming herself in sleep. She is
wise, and commits not that folly.  If we observe
her operations well, we shall find that, in the
sleeping state, all her arrangements tend to
promote sleep's great object—repose.

Therefore, unless under the disturbance of
disease, we hardly ever dream of things that
have happened to us recently.  The sort of
dream that a common-place novelist gives his
hero or heroine frequently—a dream in which
the occurrences of immediate life are reproduced
—is contrary to nature.  Also the common-place
questions at a breakfast-table, "did you dream
of our pleasant evening?" or, "Did you dream
of the beautiful girl you danced with last night?"
are (if truthfully) invariably answered in the
negative.  No! The mind, fatigued by the very
pleasure of the pleasant evening and over-excited by
the dance, has gone back to some prosy, uneventful
time of long ago, as unlike the present as possible.
That is the great rule.  Let any one reflect how
feverish and unrefreshing his sleep is if, in it, he
has seemed to continue the train of thought of
the day; if he has had what I may christen
reality-dreams; if he, during the whole night
has been dimly working at a poem, or despairingly
daubing at a picture that had occupied his
waking hours.  Such a continuation at night of
the labours of the day is always at once a proof
of, and a warning against, over-exertion of the
brain. The mathematician, who dreamed that
he was an impossible root, and could not be
extracted, might have reasonably whispered to
himself, "If you don't want to go into a
madhouse, give up fluxions for a time."

Again. The caprices of dreams show that
the mind in sleep wishes to amuse itself with
as little trouble as possible.  Rarely, very rarely,
does a dream follow any other than such a zigzag
Will-o'-the-wisp course as that with which
Göthe endows his gentlemanly marsh-meteors.
And, equally difficult with theirs, is a dream's
light track to be laid hold of.  So strange,
indeed, do some of the combinations in dreams
appear to us, that a man is apt to ask with
surprise, "How could I have dreamed such stuff?"
And to assert rashly, "I am sure I never, when
I was awake, thought or heard, or saw anything
like it."  But, by a little attention to the
movements of that watch—our own mental frame—
which so many carry without any knowledge
of its mechanism, we shall find that our strangest
dream is a combination of some three or four
ideas that had been insinuated, at different
periods and intervals—perhaps, of three or four
days—into our brain. The ideas, of which the
mind makes use in sleep, are not generally those
that are actively embraced by the intellectual
faculty, but those which have been almost
unconsciously and lazily suggested to it
while it was in a sort of passive state,
resembling that of sleep itself. Thus, I become
aware of the beautiful consistency of Nature's
operations.  I come upon a refinement of the
law of association, and of the invariable fact
that similar states of sensation reproduce similar
ideas. Thus, the state of reverie, brown study,
absence of mind, or whatever else you choose
to call it, is the fertile repertorium of dreaming
sleep: the very magazine out of which Somnus
brings his fanciful troops through the ivory or
the ebony gate.

This law of reproduction of idea through
similarity of sensation, will account for a very
remarkable phenomenon in dreaming—namely,
a kind of dream-memory, which had its origin
in sleep, and recurs in sleep so often, and so
vividly, as almost to take its stand amongst the
realities of life.  I have dreamed of scenes, and
of houses, none of which I ever saw with waking
eye, which are so perfectly stereotyped on my
mind by recurrence, that if such scenes and
houses really do exist, I should, if chance
conducted me to them, recognise them in a moment.
I know what objects in them are on the right
hand, or on the left hand.  I could draw their
forms, better perhaps than the forms of many a
real place that I have actually visited. The
moment I see these scenes or houses in a dream,
I have a strange feeling of old acquaintanceship
with them.  With these locality dreams, as I
may call them, but little action is connected.
The place constitutes the dream; that is all;
as if the mind had exhausted itself in the
pictorial effort, dream personages seldom appear
on the scene.  I have, however, another
recurring dream, which leads me through a variety
of places, dimly and indistinctly shadowed, but
of which the connecting link is no less a person
—or rather personage—than our most gracious