Rock Island daily Argus. (Rock Island, Ill.) 1886-1893, 1892-11-21
THE SLEEPING MIND.
WHILE THE JUDGMENT SLEEPS ONES
FANCY RUNS RIOT.

When the Body Is SenseIess.
AS for the power Of dreams to resusci-
tate apparently obliterated impressions,
various instances are on record; the pres
ent writer once recovered in a dream and
retained after waking a tune which he had
for months past made numerous vain at
tempts to recall The locale of his dream
was a concert room in which the tune had
actually been heard. Forgotten scenes,
disused habits, past deeds, old thoughts
some duplicate of all these the negative"
SO to speak, of each photograph, exists
somewhere in the all capacious storage
room of the mind; and it seems to be the
special function of the dream faculty to
shuttle this pack of experiences, the for
gotten and the unforgotten alike, and to
rearrange the disconnected units with
arbitrary anarchy of caprice, and with
more than kaleidoscope variety Of recon,
bination.
Hence of course the grotesque juxtaposi-
ton of incompatible things, which is the
most familiar though not the invariable
feature of dream composition, and by which
any head may be fitted upon any shoulders
You happen to know a bishop whom in
real life you have never seen or even mag
ined in any other attire than the austerest
whose whole appearance embodies your
Ideal Of decorous gravity, and you dream
Of seeing him driving stagecoach and
wearing a drab greatcoat and white hat;
but the hat and coat themselves, no less
than the bishop, are doubtless transcripts
from your experience, and the actual Jehu
to whom they properly belong. and OF
whom in waking hours you perhaps retain
no recollection, may reappear in some
other dream, habited in full prelatic garb.
/ Usually the dreamer acQuiesces without
| murmur in these lUdicrous incongruities,
| whence it would appear that as a rule our
! minds are in fact temporarily insane while
in the dream state, and as the converse Of
this thesis Mr.. Greenwood hazards the
! proposition that madness itself is but per-
petual dreaming. On the other hand, some
| dreams do appear intellectually coherent,
! assuming what is perhaps open to some
| doubt that we are ever really capable of
accurately reviewing them in all their de-
tail after awaking, and this is why it is
| apparently 80 impossible to find any theory
that will embrace the whole field of dream
phenomena and reduce them to Ineligible
unity of cause.
| Mr.. Greenwood in one passage falls back
upon the idea of mental duality, and this
seems to derive some conjectural support
from the familiar experience of dreaming
and knowing what we dream, as though
one-half Of the mind watched the other
half from a more or less external and
separate standing ground. But this is one
| OF the BY phenomena which do not advance
us far toward a general theory.
You dream Of the occurrence Of . Ger
tain incident which strikes you as singu-
lar and inexplicable, but which is pres
entity explained in the course Of the anne
dream by . sequence Of other incidents
following each other like the successive
stages OF the unravelment Of q mystery
plot in a story of Wilkie Collins' or Edgar
Poe's, the astounding and incomprehensi-
BILE thing about it being this-that, assum-
ing you to he the inventor of your own
dream. you must before the occurrence of
incident No. have already conceived and
arranged the whole sequence of incidents
of which you have nevertheless no con-
scious premonition. BewiIdering as it
seems, there is no resisting this conclusion
from Mr. Greenwood's facts, and the pres
emit writer remembers TO have had one ex-
perience essentially analogous to Mr. Green
woods and which was briefly as follows:
| He dreamed that he put question to an
other person in the form of request for
certain information, and received a differ
ent reply from Whist be could have antici-
pated, the reply taking the form of an in
telligent correction Of his own error as i'm
piled in his query. the mysterious thing
being that he was enlightened by Ibis own
creature" to borrow phrase OF Mr.. Green
woods, his creature giving him infor
nation which he received a. an acquisition
OF new knowledge, but Of which appar
entity be must nevertheless have been pos
| II haf
when he framed his own question, for his
power Of conceiving the question itself i'm
Iplied his unconscious forecast Of the reply
which yet came upon him as a surprise
1t is another case of duplex mind-ont
half Of the mind conveying to the Other
half information with which the latter
= was previously unsupplied But the pres
ent writer has had another private expert
ence, if possible, still more extraordinary
he was staying in small country house
his bedroom was imrn ediately shove
drawing room in which was a piano, anC
another inmate OF the house was a lady
who WAS an amateur pianist. About
o'clock enc morning he dreamed he WA,
In the garden, where he was presently
Joined by this lady, and together they a
once entered the house, when the lady
proceeding to the piano, sat down and be
gan playing Weber's well known polacc,
In Il, which commences with a trill O.
shake He thereupon awoke to find tina
the lady WAS actually at the piano below
that she was just commencing Weber
polacca. and that the trill, which occupie
perhaps fraction over a second In e1ecu
ton, was Just being played
Now the amazing, not to say Staggering
feature Of the thing il this: That the Incl
dent which in the dream was anteceden
to the playing Of the polaccA- tn
walk from the garden to the DRAWN,
room-nuss in reality have been inventes
by the dreamer's mind after the actua
hrst note at the music had been struck, an,
invented for the purpose Of leading ND L
that musici Mr.. Greenwood will probabI
agree with Us that this In in q eerta.l
sense an even more complex case tina,
those OF prolspsy. II seems to imply tina
the dreaming mind cannot only annihilat
the time condition Of things, a. we Apr,
bend 1t in waking experience, bat can ala