, 1890-04-02
oE DREAMS.
The Strange Impressions and Sensations
Experienced During Sleep.

Experienced During Sleep.
Ii Is told of the tyrant Dionysius
that one morning one of his intimate
friends and boon companions told him
that he had dreamed the night before
of cutting Dionysius' throat, where
upon DIOnysius caused him to be put
to death, justifying bis act by the as
sertion that unless the dreamer thought
of such a thing in his waking mo.
ments he could not have dreamed it
when asleep.
But is thai theory Of dreams tenable
or logical} Does a dream, no matter
how fantastic or unreal, presuppose a
voluntary act of the mind in the same
directionl History, observation and
experience would seem to show tine
contrary. There is no one who has
not had such dreams as he could not
devise in his waking moments, or if
he could, would not; for under GER
tain conditions of body and mind we
dream of such horrors as would af-
fright us could we conceive of them.
Modern philosophy accepS the theo-
ry that the mind Is never Wholly mac
tive, and that we always dream when
asleep, though we usually forget u
dreams. The argument is, that as it
is impossible to discharge the mind
when awake of all consciousness, or to
prevent it from acting, so the mental
process goes on while we are sleeping,
though the knowledge of its action is
not p~erceptible. The question is M
that never can be answered, but in
ductive reasoning seems to support the
position Of Sir William Hamilton and
others that the only dreamless sleep is
the sleep of death.
The phenomena of dreams have
been studied in a variety of ways and
with as much care and %exactness as
the subject permits. A French philos-
opher who took n great interest in the
subject of dreams made numerous ex-
periments upon himself to test how far
he could determine his dreams at will
by operating upon the mind through
the senses. With this view he left his
kness uncovered, and dreamed that he
was travelling at night in a diligence,
with a strong impression of cold knees
produced by the rigor of the weather.
Darwin relates the case of a deaf man
who in his dreams seemed to converse
by means of his fingers. He never had
the impression Of hearing speech, for
he had never heard it. We must
dream of objects with which we are
acquainted, but it is the combination
or use of such objects, of which we
may never have thought, though we
may dream of them, as n man may
dream of shooting another with a gun
or pistol, though nothing could be
further from his thoughts when
awake.
Tartini, who was a distinguished
violin player, is said TO have composed
his Devils Sonata under the iuspira-
ton of a dream; and Coleridge always
professcd to have composed his poem,
"Kubla Khan in u dream. The in
stances of difficult problems being
solved during sleep are too well at
tested to be questioned, and cases of
other mental labors being completed
in dreams are familiar.
And yet, with all the study and OBJ
%servation of dreams, no one has ever
yet been able to say what dreams may
come. There are so many conditions
of mind and body to be taken into ac-
count, so many unconsidered triles
which the eager memory has seized
and stored away, so many impressions
and sensations which have left a trace
behind, fleeing though it may have
seemed, that it is impossible to say
what the action of the mind will be
during our sleeping hours. We may
go to bed engrossed with a matter of
paramount importance, and dream of
the most trivial matter imaginable; or
We may go to sleep with a light heart
and in high spirits and then be
crushed and ovcrpowered by dreams
Of some impending calamity San
Francisco Chronicle.