CHAPTER V.OF DREAM.
As already stated, at the first approach of sleep we are conscious of inability so to control our thoughts as to keep them in the orderly train they had been pursuing previously. Ideas come uncalled for. Pictures rise before the mental eye and vanish instantly. Other pictures intrude, having no apparent association with their predecessors. They enter and pass before us unbidden. The mind falls into confusion. There is entanglement of the threads of thought. Even while the eye is yet open, the objects on which it gazes fade and vanish. Sounds fall faintly upon the ear and die away. The vision of the mind grows dim or is eclipsed by other unsummoned pictures, often altogether incongruous, which blend with the picture present, then melt into it, then usurp its place, and then are in their turn displaced. We are conscious that we can no longer control the movements of the mind. Momentary resistance to the influence but provokes its more vigorous return. For an instant we wake with a start to consciousness of the external world. If we desire to resist the comingon of sleep, we exert the Will fitfully, start into waking life for a few moments, contract the relaxed muscles, open the drooped eyelids, stare with a peculiar expression of imbecile amazement, strive to look as if we hadnotbeen surprised by sleep, and for a while the mind resumes its normal action. But soon again the thoughts are dislocated and replaced by a swarm of yet more dissevered ideas. We feel again the dropping lid, the relaxing muscle, the nodding head. Strive as we may, we are unable to note the moment when unconsciousness begins. We rememberfalling asleep, but we do not remember, and no human being has ever yet remembered, the very act ofgoing to sleep.
The mental condition offalling asleepresembles very closely the dissolving views at exhibitions. So do the pictures of the mind steal into the field of view and mingle and melt away; nor can we discover where one ceases and the other begins, so imperceptibly do they glide in and blend.
We sleep.
What is then ourmentalcondition?
It is a condition ofpartial unconsciousness. In this respect it differs from the condition of coma and of trance, in which there isentireunconsciousness. In the most profound sleep perfect unconsciousness never prevails. Impressions may be made upon the senses of the soundest sleeper that will waken him. The degree of oblivion caused by sleep varies immensely with various personsand with all persons at various times. Some are “light” and others “heavy” sleepers. Some are wakened by the slightest noise or the gentlest touch. Others will slumber, though rudely shaken, or while cannon are roaring. It is a remarkable fact, not yet sufficiently explained, that a whisper will often waken a sleeper by whose side a gun might be fired without disturbing him. Others will answer aloud to questions whispered to them when sleeping, and there are recorded cases of conversations being thus sustained and inconvenient revelations made by the sleeper which have astonished him on their subsequent repetition—there being in such case no after memory of the dialogue so strangely conducted.
Thesenses, therefore, are but partially sealed in sleep. They are dulled, not paralysed. They convey imperfect sensations—or the sensations conveyed are imperfectly perceived—we know not which. As will be shown presently, they more or less influence mental action. They suggest dreams. But their reflex action has ceased. The nerves that convey the messages to the brain are sluggish. The nerves that convey the consequent message from the brain to the body are for the most part inactive.
The aspect of the sleeper to the observer is that of unconsciousness. There are occasional motions of the limbs, but these are involuntary. He seems dead to the external world and to have ceased from active life.
Nevertheless, while that form is so still and seemingly so senseless—while consciousness of a world without is suspended—in this sleep that has been called the twin brother of death—the senseless sleeper is making a world and living a life of his own within himself. That brain is not sleeping with that body. It is awake and busy—often more busy than when the body is awake. It is enacting whole dramas—living new lives—wandering away among worlds of its own creation—crowding into an hour the events of years—doing, saying, seeing, hearing, feeling, even while we gaze, a hundredfold more than the waking senses could possibly convey or the waking frame perform.
Is it not marvellous when we thus think of it? Would it not be pronounced incredible—impossible—the narrator a “rogue and vagabond”—the believer a credulous fool—were it not that it isa factfamiliar to all of us? Is it not in itself as marvellous as any of the phenomena of other abnormal mental conditions, which are received with such incredulity and ridicule only because they are of less frequent occurrence and less familiar?
But before we pursue the inquiry into the phenomena of Dream, it will be necessary to describe the material mechanism by the operations of which those phenomena are produced. This will be properly the theme of a distinct chapter.