Idaho semi-weekly world. [volume] (Idaho City, Idaho Territory) 1875-1908, 1893-02-07
THE SLEEPING MIND.
WHILE The JUDGMENT SLEEPS ONES
FANCY RUNS RIOT.

WHILE The JUDGMENT SLEEPS ONES
FANCY RUNS RIOT.
urotesaac Jmxtsposition Of Incompati. j
BILE Things During Our siumberinr
Hours--straage Sensations That Oeeur
When the BODY Il ssnssIess.
As for the power of dreams to resuac,-
tate apparently obliterated Impressions
Various instances are on record; the pres-
mt writer once recovered in dream and
retained after waking a tune which he had
Ior months past made numerous vain at
tempts to recall. The locale Of his dream
Was concert room in which the tune had
ectually been heard. Forgotten scenes.
disused habits, past deeds, old thoughts
some duplicate Of all these, the negative"
20 to speak, OF each photograph, exists
somewhere in the all capacious storage
room OF the mind; and 1t 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 q bishop whom in
real life you have never seen or even imag-
tned 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 white hat;
but the hat and coat themselves, no less
than the bishop, are doubtless transcripts
A 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
q murmur in these ludicrous incongruities
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 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
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
Q seems to derive some conjectural support
from the familiar experience of dreaming
9 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.
D You dream of the occurrence of a GER
$ tain incident which strikes you as singu-
: lar and inexplicable, but which is pres
emily explained i'll the course Of the same
dream by sequence of other incidents
l following each other like the successive
stages of the unravelment of a mystery
plot in a story of Wilkie Collins or Edgar
Poe's, the astounding and incomprehensi-
bic thing about it being this-that, assum
ing you to be the inventor of your OWL
: dream, you must before the occurrence Of
incident No. have already conceived anl
arranged the whole sequence of incident:
of which you have nevertheless no con
scious premonition. Bewildering as i
. seems, there is no resisting this conclusion
from Mr. Greenwood's facts, and the pres
I emit writer remembers to have had one ex
perience essentially analogous to Mr.. Green
Q woods and which was briefly as follows:
n He dreamed that he put question to an
a other person in the form Of a request fo
certain information, and received differ
ent reply from what he could have antici
:. pated, the reply taking the form of an in
y telligent correction of his own error as i'm
8 piled in his query, the mysterious thing
= being that he was enlightened by "his owl
creature" to borrow phrase of Mr.. Green
O woods, his creature" giving him infor
n nation which he received as an acquisition
a of new knowledge, but of which appar
:. emily he must nevertheless have been pos
; sessed at that anteeedent point of tim
when he framed his own question, for hi
II power of conceiving the question itself i'm
n piled bis unconscious forecast Of the reply
2 which yet came upon him as surprise.
d 1t is another case of duplex mind-on
half of the mind conveying to the othe
# half information with which the latte
~ was previously unsupplied. But the pres
= ent writer has had another private expert
: ence, if possible, still more extraordinary
x He was staying in small country house
8. his bedroom was Immediately above
lie drawing room in which was piano, an
d another inmate of the house was q lad
\. who was an amateur pianist. About
III, o'clock one morning he dreamed he wa
in the garden, where he was present.
Joined by this lady, and together they a
once entered the house, when the lady
a. proceeding to the piano, sat down and bt
!, gan playing Weber's well known polacc
in L, which commences with trill c
~ shake He thereupon awoke to find tina
10 the lady was actually at the piano below
Sc that she was just commencing Weber
ly polaccn, and that the trill, which occupit
it, perhaps a fraction over second in excel
m ton, was just being played.
" Now the amazing, not to say staggerin!
=, feature of the thing is this: That the inc
y dent which in the dream was anteceder
III TO the playing of the polacca-viz., th
" walk from the garden to the drawn
re room-must in reality have been invente
I'd by the dreamer's mind after the actui
e, first note of the music had been struck, an
er invented for the purpose of leading up
ra that musicl Mr.. Greenwood Will probab
a. agree with us that this is in certa1
sense an. even more complex case tina
those of prolepsy. 1t seems to imply tn;
- the dreaming mind cannot only annlhila
cl- the time condition of things, as we appr
bend it in waking experience, but can all
inyert or dislocate their time sequence In
manner which the wide awake intellect
te. nowerless to understand or to conceiv
w Truly such stuff as dreams are made Of