The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1898-11-26
pie who have not in greater or less
degree had dreams of this kind.


O g g
That the mind often works intelli
gently and logically in dreams, solv-
ing problems or smoothing out per-
picking difficulties that have occurred
in actual life, has been proved by testi-
mony that cannot be gainsaid. Frank
lin gives several instances where lines
of policy or of argument came to him
in his dreams that had greatly puzzled
him when awake, and Condorcet, the
French mathematician, relates that
he solved many intricate problems IN
his dreams "Kubla Kahn that ex-
quisite fragment of Coleridge's genius,
was composed by him in sleep, and 50
wildly was it impressed on his mind
that he sat down the next morning to
write it out While thus engaged he
was interrupted by a visitor-a person
from Porlock a neighboring village
and when he resumed his pen the poem
had vanished from his mind and he
was never afterward able to recall an
other line. How many lovers of poetry
have mathematical that person from
Porlock" would be hard to say, but
their name is legion.
THE Devils Sonata" is one of the
finest and most remarkable compost
lions for the violin that is known Its
composer, Tartini, the renowned Ita1-
ian violinist, says that he dreamed that
the devil challenged him to a trial of
skill on the violin, and that the Prince
of Pandemonium so far excelled him in
brilliancy and execution that he gave
up in despair. On awakening and find
ing that it was all a dream he wrote
out the notes that were still throbbing
in his mind.
DR.. Johnson tells that he had once a
dream in which he engaged in a contest
of wit with some other person, and that
he was very much mortified by imagln-
ing that his opponent had the better of
him, something that the doctor seldom
permitted in his waking hours.
In explanation OF his dream, however,
he said: zone may mark here the eff
feet of sleep in weakening the power of
reflection, for, had not my Judgment
failed me, l should have seen that the
wit of this supposed antagonist, by
whose superiority l felt myself de-
pressed, was as much furnished by me
as that which had thought 1 had been
uttering in my own character"
Not only are the reflective powers
weakened in dreams, as DIR. Johnson
thus points out, but the moral faculty
also, and it is quite certain that excel
lent people, who would not wrong a
neighbor or a fellow being in any way
in their waking hours, view with the
utmost serenity of conscience the com
mission of almost any crime.
q 9
Strange beyond all comprehension are
| the phenomena Of sleep. While prone
upon our beds we enter a land of en-
chantment, where we see, and converse,
and travel, and engage in wonderful
enterprises. We are limited by neither
time nor space. The impossible becomes
the actual, the unborn live, the dead
come back and miracles are the COM
monplace of existence.
| One third of our lives is passed in
this realm, which Shelley has called the
brother of death
How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleepi
| One pale as yonder waning moon,
With lips of lurid blue;
The other rosy as the morn,
! 1t bushes DER the world;
| Yet both so passing wonderful.
Two things in human experience
apart from revelation, tend to prove ths
immortality of the soul. One is that
the mind never grows old. The man OF
! 20 is as youthful in his mental emo
| lions and thought as a boy of 10 The
other is dreaming, wherein the mind
apparently acts Independently of the
! body.
Can Immortality be any more i'm
probable or impossible than our dream
! life?