Staunton vindicator. [volume] (Staunton, Va.) 1860-1896, 1892-10-14
THE SLEEPING MIND.
WHILE THE JUDGMENT SLEEPS ONES
FANCY RUNS RIOT.

GrOtesque Juxtaposition of Incompat1-
Bile Things During Our Slumbering
HOurs-Strange Sensations That Occur
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 dream and
retained after waking q tune which he had
for months past made numerous vain at
tempts to recall. The locale of his dream
was 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
any head may be fitted upon any shoulders.
You happen to know bishop whom in
real life you have never seen or even mag
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
OF seeing him driving a stagecoach and
wearing drab greatcoat and a 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
a murmur in these ludicrous incongruties.
whence it would appear that as 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 a 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 so impossible to find any theory
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 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 a GER
tain incident which strikes you as singu-
lar and inexplicable, but which is pres
emily explained in the course of the same
dream by a sequence of other incidents
following each other like the successive
stages of the unravelment of 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 be the inventor of your own
dream, You must before the occurrence of
incident No. l have already conceived and
arranged the whole sequence of incidents
of which you have nevertheless no con-
scious premonition. Bewildering as it
seems, there is no resisting this conclusion
from Mr.. Greenwood's facts, and the pres
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 a request for
certain information, and received differ
ent reply from what he 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 This own
creature" to borrow phrase of Mr.. Green
woods, his creature" giving him infor-
nation which he received as an acquisition
of new knowledge, but of which appar-
emily he must nevertheless have been pos
sessed at that antecedent point of time
when he framed his own question, for his
power of conceiving the question itself i'm
piled his unconscious forecast of the reply
which yet came upon him as surprise
1t is another case of duplex mind-one
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 a small country house;
his bedroom was Immediately above a
drawing room in which was piano, and
another inmate of the house was lady
who was an amateur pianist. About s
o'clock one morning he dreamed he was
in the garden, where he was presently
joined by this lady, and together they at
once entered the house, when the lady,
proceeding to the piano, sat down and be-
gan playing Weber's well known polacca
in E, which commences with trill or
shake He thereupon awoke to find that
the lady was actually at the piano below;
that she was lust commencing Weber's
polacca, and that the trill, which occupies
perhaps fraction over a second in execu-
ton, was just being played.
Now the amazing, not to say staggering,
feature of the thing is this: That the Incl
dent which in the dream was antecedent
to the playing of the polacca-viz., the
walk from the garden to the drawing
room-must in reality have been invented
by the dreamer's mind after the actual
first note of the music had been struck, and
invented for the purpose of leading up to
that music! Mr. Greenwood will probably
agree with US that this is in a certain
sense an even more complex case than
those of prolepsy. 1t seems to imply that
the dreaming mind cannot only annihilate
the time condition of things, as we appre
bend it in waking experience, but can also
invert or dislocate their time sequence in a
manner which the wide awake intellect is
powerless to understand or to conceive
Truly "such stuff as dreams are made of
is a material which we have yet to analyze
London Spectator.
False Alarm.
81 have just found well defined case of
Asiatic collarer!" shouted the excited citi-