"How do you explain the fact that incidents occupying a large portion of the night, occurred in an interval which you describe as a flash?"
"Easily enough; in dreams time may not exist: periods embracing weeks or mouths may be reduced to an instant. Long journeys, hours of conversation, or a multitude of transactions, may be compressed into a term measured by the opening or closing of a door, or the striking of a clock. In dreams, ordinary standards of reason find no place, while ideas or events chase through the mind more rapidly than thought."
"Conceding all this, why did I, considering the unusual character of the incidents, accept them as real, as substantial, as natural as the most commonplace events?"
"There is nothing extraordinary in that," he replied. "In dreams all sorts of absurdities, impossibilities, discordancies, and violation of natural law appear realities, without exciting the least surprise or suspicion. Imagination runs riot and is supreme, and reason for the time is dormant. We see ghosts, spirits, the forms of persons dead or living,—we suffer pain, pleasure, hunger,—and all sensations and emotions, without a moment's question of their reality."
"Do any of the subjects of our dreams or visions leave tangible evidences of their presence?"
"Assuredly not," he answered, with an incredulous, half-impatient gesture; "the idea is absurd."
"Then I was not dreaming," I mused.
Without looking at me, the Professor went on: "These false presentiments may have their origin in other ways, as from mental disorders caused by indigestion. Nicolai, a noted bookseller of Berlin, was thus afflicted. His experiences are interesting and possibly suggestive. Let me read some of them to you."
The Professor hereupon glanced over his bookshelf, selected a volume, and proceeded to read: [1]
"I generally saw human forms of both sexes; but they usually seemed not to take the smallest notice of each other, moving as in a market place, where all are eager to press through the crowd; at times, however, they seemed to be transacting business with each other. I also saw several times, people on horseback, dogs, and birds.
- ↑ This work I have found to be Vol. IV. of Chambers’ Miscellany, published by Gould and Lincoln, Boston.—J. U. L.
