Then turn to the words of Marmontel, which identify the wanderings of a dream with the flitting fancies of a mind prostrate from the effect of disorder. These words were written under _extreme indisposition_:—
“I was reduced so low, that I could read nothing but the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments; and it is extraordinary that often, while every other faculty, judgment, the will, association, perfection, even the memory itself, is in a state of almost total re-action, this volatile thing, imagination, should be the most robust and active; it seems to rejoice at the release from companionship with its fellows, and darts off on seraph-wings, rambles through all space, visits all places, turning, and tossing, and jostling all things in its progress, or conjoining them in the most grotesque shapes. The imagination in _madmen_ is often of this description; and there may be
“A pleasure in madness, that none but madmen know.”
Then we may dream _ourselves_ to be _others_,—an ideal transmigration; this is error. We wake to a sense of our own reality; this is truth.
CAST. Yet this truth may be often withheld by potent impression, as in the illusion of Rip Van Winkle, and the trances of Nourjahad. I believe the waking mind of Caspar Hauser knew not the difference between dream and reality; he related his dream as _fact_.
EV. If there were ever such a being as Caspar Hauser, his _life_ was a _dream_; for, without the culture of his mind, he would be reasonless.
“_Rom._ I dreamt a dream to night. _Merc._ And so did I. _Rom._ Well, what was yours? _Merc._ That dreamers often lie.” ROMEO AND JULIET.
ASTR. Then we are to learn that the mind is ever _imperfect_ in a dream. But, Evelyn, is not that rather perfection, which magnifies space and time a million-fold, completing the labours of years in a second? The time occupied with the dream must be limited, often far short of the seeming duration of a scene. Like the wonderful velocity of atoms of light, the crude and heterogeneous ideas succeed each other with incalculable rapidity. We appear to have travelled over a series of miles, or to have existed for a series of years, during a very minute portion of the night,—how minute it is perhaps impossible to determine. I believe it is the Opium-Eater, still, who thus confesses:—“I sometimes seemed to have lived for seventy or a hundred years, in one night; nay, sometimes, had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or however of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience.”