The Wilmington daily Republican. (Wilmington, Del.) 1890-1902, 1892-10-29
THE SLEEPING MIND.
WHILE THE JUDGMENT SLEEPS ONES
FANCY RUNS RIOT.

Hours-strange Sensations That Occur |,
when the body 10 senseIess.
As for the power of dreams to resusci- |
tate apparently obliterated impressions, |
various instances are on record; the pres I
emit writer once recovered in dream and \
retained after waking 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 bishop whom in
| real life you have never seen or even imag
| ined in any other attire than the austerest
| broadcloth and episcopal black hose, and
whose whole appearance embodies your
! ideal OF decorous gravity, and you dream
I OF seeing him driving q stagecoach and
wearing n 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
u murmur in these ludicrous incongruities,
whence it would appear that as n 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 awakiny, aud this is why 1t is
apparently 30 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 VI mental duality, and this
seems to derive some coniectural 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 II general theory.
You dream Of the occurrence of a GER
tain incident which strikes you as singu.
lar and inexplicable, but which is pres
taf, d, he of ha
dream by a sequence of other incidents
following each other like the successive
3 stages OF the unravelment OF n 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 owT
D dream, you must before the occurrence Of
+ incident No. have already conceived and
arranged the whole sequence of incidents
T. of which you have nevertheless no con
scious premonition. Bewildering AS il
seems, there is no resisting this conclusion
i from Mr.. Grcenwoods facts, and the pres
+ ent 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 n request TO
certain information, and received differ
ent reply from what lac 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 thin
being that he was enlightened by "his owi
creature" to borrow phrase of Mr. Green
woods his Creature" giving him infoi
nation which he received as an acquisitio
Of new knowledge but of which appal
emily he must nevertheless have been POI
sessed at that anteccdent point of tim
when he framed his own question. for hi
! power of conceivng the question itself in
piled his unconscious forecast of the repl,
which yet came upon him as n surprise.
1t Is another case of duplex mind-or
half of the mind conveying to the otht
half information with which the latte
was previously unsupplied. But the pre-
ent writer has had another private exper
ence, If possible, still more eXtraordinar
He was staying in small country hous
bis bedroom was Immediately above
drawing room in which was a piano, al
another inmate of the house was laC
who was an amateur pianist About
o'clock one morning he dreamed he vi
in the garden where he was present
joined by this lady, and together they
once entered the house, when the lad
proceeding 10 the piano, sat down and |
| gan playing Weber's well known polac
L, in e, which commences with trill
shake. lie thereupon awoke to lind tn
the lady was actually at the piano belo
that she was just commencing Webe
polacca, and that the trill, which occup
perhaps fraction over u second in exec
r, ton, was just being played.
N Now the amazing, not to say staggerir
il feature of the thing is this: That the in
dent which in the dream was antecedt
to the playing of the polacca-viz.,
walk from the garden to the drawi
room-must in reality have been invent
by the dreamer's mind after the actI
first note Of the music had been struck a
invented for the purpose OF leading up
that musicl Mr.. Greenwood will probal
agree with us that this is in cert
sense an even more complex case IL
those of prolepsy. II seems to imply Il
the dreaming mind cannot only annihl
the time condition of things, as we apr
bend it in waking experience, but can a
nvert or dislocate their time sequence
manner which the wide awake intellec
pOwerless to understand or to conce
Truly "such stuff rs dreams are made
is a material which we have yet to analy
. london Spectator.