m likewise parts of another dream which I
had many years ago, and it was in the reverie which happened when you
quitted me in the Colosaeum that I wove all these thoughts together, and
gave them the form in which I narrated them to you.

_Amb_.--Of course we may consider them as an accurate representation of
your waking thoughts.

_Phil_.--I do not say that they strictly are so, for I am not quite
convinced that dreams are always representations of the state of the mind
modified by organic diseases or by associations. There are certainly no
absolutely new ideas produced in sleep, yet I have had more than one
instance, in the course of my life, of most extraordinary combinations
occurring in this state, which have had considerable influence on my
feelings, my imagination, and my health.

_Onu_.--Why Philalethes, you are becoming a visionary, a dreamer of
dreams. We shall perhaps set you down by the side of Jacob Behmen or of
Emanuel Swedenbourg, and in an earlier age you might have been a prophet,
and have ranked perhaps with Mahomet. But pray give us one of these
instances in which such a marvellous influence was produced on your
imagination and your health by a dream that we may form some judgment of
the nature of your second sight or inspirations; and whether they have
any foundation, or whether they are not, as I believe, really unfounded,
inventions of the fancy, dreams respecting dreams.

_Phil_.--I anticipate unbelief, and I expose myself to your ridicule in
the statement I am about to make, yet I shall mention nothing but a
simple fact. Almost a quarter of a century ago, as you know, I
contracted that terrible form of typhus-fever known by the name of gaol-
fever, I may say, not from any imprudence of my own, but whilst engaged
in putting in execution a plan for ventilating one of the great prisons
of the metropolis. My illness was severe and dangerous. As long as the
fever continued, my dreams or delirium were most painful and oppressive;
but when the weakness consequent to exhaustion came on, and when the
probability of death seemed to my physicians greater than that of life,
there was an entire change in all my ideal combinations. I remained in
an apparently senseless or lethargic state, but in fact my mind was
peculiarly active; there was always before me the form of a beautiful
woman, with whom I was engaged in the most interesting and intellectual
conversation.

_Amb_.--The figure of a lady with