“We forget how superior, to mortals below, Is the fiction they dream to the truth which they know.”
I opened the leaf of a volume, in which an accomplished pen had traced an episode so like my own, as to make me wonder at its truth.
It was of a visionary German, who, like myself, commanded the phantasie of sleep’s own world, bringing one night thus in connexion with another. He fashioned, like Pygmalion, his idol, Love, and nightly met and wooed, till he won her to his heart, and then he cried,—“What if this glorious sleep be a real life, and this dull waking the true repose?” At length his ideal of beauty, his _dream_, died, stung by a serpent. And then the order of the vision was reversed; the dream lay again before him, dead and withered; he saw his idol only when he was awake, and this was to him a dream. He pined in thought, and died,—sleeping.
Was not the sleep of this man his real life, and a scene of happiness? Could _he_ wish for reality who had enjoyed such a dream? For if in life there were equal sleep and waking, and the sleep were all a happy dream, this would indeed be a happy life.
May I tell you, Evelyn, that I enjoyed a deep sublimity of feeling, a consciousness of that mental emancipation which devout philosophers have more than glanced at?
IDA. Although you have again rather run wild, Astrophel, I agree with you in thinking that, under this influence, the dream may be an illustration of Plato’s notion, regarding the existence of eternal forms, independent of matter,—an emanation of the divine mind imparted to that of human beings; that _innate idea_, if you will, by which the mind views at large—
And I therefore revere the opinion of Sir Thomas Brown, the ingenious author of the “Religio Medici,” (with whom believed Sir Henry Wotton, Bossuet, and other good men,) “That we are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleeps, and the slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul. It is the legation of sense, but the liberty of reason; and our waking conceptions do not match the fancies of our sleeps.” And also the sentiment of Addison, that “there seems something in this consideration, that intimates to us a natural grandeur and perfection of the soul.”