rcumstances, tossed
backwards and forwards on a sea of conflicting events, now hurried
along by a current of opinion, now blinded with the spray of false
accusation, then motionless for a moment, trying to collect our
shattered thoughts before the next onslaught: but all the time out of
touch, consciously, with what is going on, utterly powerless, trying to
gather up the threads and recover consciousness. Any action that we
take, any word that we utter, is done without thought, without
knowledge, and without any result. And yet neither the cause nor the
effect are, strictly speaking, physical. The position is a mental
attitude, in this case mental helplessness, and this is dependent
solely upon the relation of the mind to exterior circumstances. When
we are fully conscious, we are ourselves each the centre of a little
world, which includes all that concerns us, and the appearance of this
depends entirely upon its particular meaning for us. We do not,
cannot, under these circumstances, see anything exactly as it is: its
appearance is influenced by its importance for us or by the degree of
approval, or disapproval which we ourselves attach to it. When our
life becomes a dream, our sphere is broken into and usurped by the
changing of values, shapes, and appearance of things within it. The
old familiar forms are transfigured and tampered with, our mistaken or
incomplete idea of persons is revealed, and a host of new and
inexplicable forms appear; with the result that we are literally
bewildered, and instead of regarding things with reference to their
influence upon us, we see things as they are in themselves--when we can
see at all--and feel what they actually do to us.

There can be no one who is not aware of this experience, in a greater
or a less degree. I speak of it as dreaming because that is the
analogy which best represents the circumstances, all of which have been
explained except one. In the same way as we are not conscious that
what we have been dreaming is a dream until we awake, so in these
periods of our actual life in which we are deprived of will and are
borne along by exterior circumstances and forces, we are not aware of
our helplessness, of our utter weakness, of the significance of what we
have seen and heard, until we have regained consciousness and woken
again to our freedom.

In this sense I have recently had a dream, and only since have I
realised that what I dreamt was fact; and then I wa