The Austin weekly statesman. (Austin, Tex.) 1883-1898, 1883-08-30
AMONG THE DREAMERS.

Drain TO De accounted lot HOW are
they to be explained? The relation
of dream, in which the devil, in the
guise of Mephisto,. paid a gentleman
of this city visit, has led to train
of thought upon dreams. One writer
says "a dream is temporary frolic of
the brain, which, released from the
guidance of reason, relaXes from rules
and laws, and INDUCES in little in
coherent amusement of its own"
Though not a so-called philosophical
writer, this one has here more nearly
explained a dream than hundreds of
others have in long and learned diser-
tations. Truly. dreaming is the work
ing of mind full of fancies, let free
to think or do as it pleases, following
with incoherent steps the maises of an
endless labyrinth, leading nowhere, and
ever opening up vistas through the
past and the future, displaying ma
tural and unnatural views, panoramas
of disconnecting thought, real and
strange in their multiplicity, but
often appearing so real as to be called
supernatural. Out of thousands of
dreams one may appear to be other
than the baseleSs fabric of a Wis
ion, and then it is regarded as the
work of superhuman forces. The al
chemist prepares nine hundred and
ninety-nine compounds and the thous
andth only is a success. So it is with
dreams. Fancy, unbridled, takes the
range of thehuman mind, and as it gal
lops from one to another field, strange
scenes are passed and stranger re-
lations are evolved. Were there any,
thing superhuman in dreams, were
they, as some assert, the evidence of
things unseen-retiections of the soul
they would lack that incoherence,
which makes them peculiarly fascin-
ating, because Of their most fantastic
imageries. The Platonists held that
the mind is never dormant, that con-
seriousness reigns during sleep as
when awake. They held that
the mind is ever active. while
Locke believed the mind, during sleep,
really ceases to be active. Kant de-
clares that the mind, of necessity,
must remain active; that were we to
cease TO dream, while asleep, the ma.
chinery of life would then have ceased
to move. We read, many years ago,
treatise on dreams, in which it was
held, like Kant, that the mind is ever
active in sleep; that it must remain
ever active, or die. The writer of this
treatise held, that when the mind in
sleep leads us through great trials we
move along the dizziest heights of
morts lily with theyawning chasms of
immortality at our very feet. A po-
sition of the body retardS the move
ment of the blood that courses through
the arteries, and we dream of these dir
zy heights and of theyawning abyses;
false step, then, and down we go, IN
dreamland's visionary sphere. while if
we wake before the catastrophe is
reached we are saved from death.
These men of plethoric life, who die
in their sleep, dream of precipitation,
and dreaming on until they
meet. the catastrophe, they cease
to exist. 1t is the active
mind, rejecting the condition of the
body, that leads US through these aw-
full dreams, where death makes the
boldeSt advances to cut the silver cord,
holding mortality out of the sphere
of Immortality. TO have no recol-
lection of dreams does .ot prove that
we are not necessarily dreaming
while asleep. How often do we know
we have dreamed, though no trace of
what we dreamt cling to memory.
The physical senses operate to shape
dreams. One applies hot bottle to his
feet, and sleeps,and then he dreams Of
walking over parched sands. Where
any of the senses are imperfect dreams
are modified in relation to this imper-
lection. One, deaf from childhood,
never dreams of voices or of sounds.
The senses being dead to such rela-
tions, he dreams, as he lives, in a
voiceless world. So do the habits of
men lead to certain order of dreams.
The wild Indian dreams of
the hunt and of human
butcheries, not of the scenes of civili-
cation. The digestive organs become
the agencies through which dreams are
fashioned. IT their functions are nor.
NAL, dreams are pleasant and agreea-
BILE; if not. they are disagreeable and
often terrible. In paper on "hash-
ish eaters" the effect of narcotics in
the moulding of fan cies, while asleep,
are portrayed. Such dreams are re-
markably fanciful, and that which is
most unnatural predominates. A life
time is often encompassed in dream,
and what is most remarkable is, that
it is embraced in the shortest period of
dreaming. The report of gun caused
man to dream that he had enlisted
as soldier, had gone to the wars, had
been apprehended and condemned to
be shot, waking just as the
gun fired, which he dreamed was
aimed at him for his execution.
The same gentleman referred to as
being visited, in dream, by the devil
in the guise of Mephisto, once slept
before window, below which the
ripping waters of Lake Geneva flow
outward into the active current of
the Rhone. He dreamed that sickness
had overtaken him in a foreign land
that death had ensued, and that his spir.
it existed in strange sphere. There
all was beautiful and sublime, with a
mellow gloam pervading all about
him. Chief among all things was en-
chanting music, such as no mortal ear
ever heard. The cadences of the
seraph land f1oated in mellow waves
in every direction. Waking, the
music continued, and it was only
through test of the physical
senses that our dreamer satisfied him.
self he was not really dead
that in spirit he had not been intro
duced to the spiritual existence. A
string band below his window, ha6
just awaked musical echoes and out Of
sweetest Lotes grew pain and death
and the realization of spiritual ex'
istence, so vivid asl to deceive the
awakened man into the delusion that