ich are connected with dreams, are
sometimes favored by, and perhaps dependent upon a certain morbid
condition or irritability of the nervous system, which suggests the
dread of some impending calamity, a painful and indefinite sense of
apprehension for which no ostensible reason can be assigned. Strange as
it might appear, the influence of our dreams upon our waking state is
very remarkable; we may awaken refreshed from a dream which has made us,
in our sleep, superlatively happy; or we may rise with melancholic
feelings after suffering intense affliction in some dream, and the
details of both dreams may alike be forgotten. We can not, after being
so much disturbed, at once regain our composure; the billows continue
heaving after the tempest has subsided; the troubled nerves continue to
vibrate after the causes that disturbed them have ceased to act; the
impression still remains, and checkers the happiness of the future day.
Even men of strong mind, who do not believe in the interpretation of
dreams, may be so affected. When Henry the Fourth of France was once
told by an astrologer that he would be assassinated, he smiled at the
prediction, and did not believe it; but he confessed that it often
haunted him afterward, and although he placed no faith in it, still it
sometimes depressed his spirits, and he often expressed a wish that he
had never heard it. In like manner, dreams, which persons do not believe
in, will unconsciously affect the tenor of their thoughts and feelings.

There are many persons who appear to have habitually the most
extraordinary dreams, and there is scarcely a family circle that
assemble round the domestic hearth, in which some one or other of the
party is not able to relate some very wonderful story. We have,
ourselves, a _repertoire_, from which we could select a host of such
narrations; but we have preferred, at the risk of being thought
recapitulative, to dwell upon those which have been recorded upon
unimpeachable authority. The dreams which men like Locke, Reid, Gregory,
Abercrombie, Macnish, &c., have attested, come with a weight of evidence
before us which the dreams of persons unknown in the scientific or
literary world would not possess. The impressions produced by dreams are
so fugitive--so easy is it for persons unintentionally to deceive
themselves in recalling their dreams' experience--that Epictetus, long
ago, advised young men not to entertain any company by relating their
dreams,