al consequence of dreams
Of the unpleasant kind, with none at hand
To expound their vain and visionary gleams.
I've known some odd ones which seemed really planned
Prophetically, as that which one deems
'A strange coincidence,' to use a phrase
By which such things are settled now-a-days."

BYRON.

Dreams--What age, or what country of the world has not felt and
acknowledged the mystery of their origin and end? I have thought not a
little upon the subject, seeing it is one which has been often forced
upon my attention, and sometimes strangely enough; and yet I have never
arrived at any thing which at all appeared a satisfactory conclusion. It
does appear that a mental phenomenon so extraordinary cannot be wholly
without its use. We know, indeed, that in the olden times it has been
made the organ of communication between the Deity and his creatures; and
when, as I have seen, a dream produces upon a mind, to all appearance
hopelessly reprobate and depraved, an effect so powerful and so lasting
as to break down the inveterate habits, and to reform the life of an
abandoned sinner. We see in the result, in the reformation of morals,
which appeared incorrigible in the reclamation of a human soul which
seemed to be irretrievably lost, something more than could be produced by
a mere chimaera of the slumbering fancy, something more than could arise
from the capricious images of a terrified imagination; but once
prevented, we behold in all these things, in the tremendous and
mysterious results, the operation of the hand of God. And while Reason
rejects as absurd the superstition which will read a prophecy in every
dream, she may, without violence to herself, recognize, even in the
wildest and most incongruous of the wanderings of a slumbering intellect,
the evidences and the fragments of a language which may be spoken, which
_has_ been spoken to terrify, to warn, and to command. We have reason to
believe too, by the promptness of action, which in the age of the
prophets, followed all intimations of this kind, and by the strength of
conviction and strange permanence of the effects resulting from certain
dreams in latter times, which effects ourselves may have witnessed, that
when this medium of communication has been employed by the Deity, the
evidences of his presence have been unequivocal. My thoughts were
directed to this subject, in a manner to leave a lasting impression upon
my mind, by the events which I shall now relate,