parcel of
the life existence of the individual. When a person is asleep he has
only become unresponsive to the mass of stimuli of the external
world which constitutes his environment. As Sidis says, "When our
interest in external existence fags and fades away, we go to sleep.
When our interests in the external world cease, we draw up the
bridges, so to say, interrupt all external communication as far as
possible, and become isolated in our own fortress and repair to our
own world of organic activity and inner dream life. Sleep is the
interruption of our intercourse with the external world: it is the
laying down of our arms in the struggle of life. Sleep is a truce
with the world."

The twin concepts of higher space and curved time sanction a view of
sleep even bolder. Sleep is more than a longing of the body to be
free of the flame which consumes it: the flame itself aspires to be
free--that is to say, consciousness, tiring of its tool, the brain,
and of the world, its workshop, takes a turn into the plaisance of
the fourth dimension, where time and space are less rigid to resist
the fulfillment of desire.

DREAMS

We find a confirmation of this view in dream phenomena. But however
good the evidence, we shall fail to make out a case unless dream
experiences are conceded to be as real as any other. The reluctance
we may have to make this concession comes first from the purely
subjective character of dreams, and secondly from their triviality
and irrationality--it is as though the muddy sediment of daytime
thought and feeling and that alone were there cast forth. In answer
to the first objection, advanced psychology affirms that the
subconscious mind, from which dreams arise, approaches more nearly
to the omniscience of true being than the rational mind of waking
experience. The triviality and irrationality of dreams are
sufficiently accounted for if the dream state is thought of as the
meeting place of two conditions of consciousness: the foam and
flotsam "of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn," whose vastitude,
whose hidden life, and rich argosies of experience, can only be
inferred from the fret of the tide on their nether shore--the tired
brain in sleep.

For it is the _remembered_ dream alone that is incoherent--the dream
that comes clothed in the rags and trappings of this work-a-day world,
and so leaves some recoverable record on the brain. We all feel that
the dreams we cannot remember are the most wond