over-excited
imagination. Even persons subject to hallucinations, like Nicolai of
Berlin, learn to recognize the unreal character of these phantasms. On
this point the following bit of autobiography from the pen of Coleridge
throws an interesting light. "A lady (he writes) once asked me if I
believed in ghosts and apparitions. I answered with truth and
simplicity, No, madam, I have seen far too many myself."[68] However
irresistible our sense-illusions may be, so long as we are under the
sway of particular impressions or mental images, we can, when resolved
to do so, undeceive ourselves by carefully attending to the actual
state of things about us. And in many cases, when once the correction is
made, the illusion seems an impossibility. By no effort of imagination
are we able to throw ourselves back into the illusory mental condition.
So long as this power of dispelling the illusion remains with us, we
need not be alarmed at the number and variety of the momentary
misapprehensions to which we are liable.

CHAPTER VII.

DREAMS.

The phenomena of dreams may well seem at first sight to form a world of
their own, having no discoverable links of connection with the other
facts of human experience. First of all, there is the mystery of sleep,
which quietly shuts all the avenues of sense and so isolates the mind
from contact with the world outside. To gaze at the motionless face of a
sleeper temporarily rapt from the life of sight, sound, and
movement--which, being common to all, binds us together in mutual
recognition and social action--has always something awe-inspiring. This
external inaction, this torpor of sense and muscle, how unlike to the
familiar waking life, with its quick responsiveness and its overflowing
energy! And then, if we look at dreams from the inside, we seem to find
but the reverse face of the mystery. How inexpressibly strange does the
late night-dream seem to a person on waking! He feels he has been seeing
and hearing things no less real than those of waking life; but things
which belong to an unfamiliar world, an order of sights and a sequence
of events quite unlike those of waking experience; and he asks himself
in his perplexity where that once-visited region really lies, or by what
magic power it was suddenly and for a moment created for his vision. In
truth, the very name of dream suggests something remote and mysterious,
and when we want to characterize some impression or scene which b