"Our dreams descend from Jove."
That is, from the seat of intellect, and declare their import when our
will sleeps. Then are they of weighty and reliable import, yet require
the like suppression of our will to make plain their significance.
Only so is the oracle made reliable. The good alone dream divinely.
Our dreams are characteristic of our waking thoughts and states; we
are never out of character; never quite another, even when fancy seeks
to metamorphose us entirely. The Person is One in all the manifold
phases of the Many through which we transmigrate, and we find ourself
perpetually, because we cannot lose ourself personally in the mazes of
the many. 'Tis the one soul in manifold shapes, ever the old friend of
the mirror in other face, old and new, yet one in endless revolution
and metamorphosis, suggesting a common relationship of forms at their
base, with divergent types as these range wider and farther from their
central archetype, including all concrete forms in nature, each
returning into other, and departing therefrom in endless revolution.[14]
[Footnote 14: The seeming miracle and mystery of the mesmeric, or
clairvoyant vivacity, is best explained by conceiving the instreaming
force of the operator driving the magnetic current from cerebrum to
the cerebellum of his victim, and there, while under the pressure,
reporting the operator's sensations and thoughts through the common
brain of both. And this view is confirmed by the further fact that
under this dominating force the domain of memory is the more deeply
searched, and things revealed which, separate and alone, left unaided
by such agencies, neither could have divined. It is like one's adding
a double brain to his own, and subsidizing it the while to serve his
particular ends.]
"I catch myself philosophizing most eloquently," wrote Thoreau, "when
first returning to consciousness in the night or morning. I make the
truest observations and distinctions then when the will is yet wholly
asleep, and mind works like a machine without friction. I was conscious
of having in my sleep transcended the limits of the individual, and
made observations and carried on conversations which in my waking hours
I can neither recall nor appreciate. As if, in sleep, our individual
fell into the infinite mind, and at the moment of awakening we found
ourselves on the confines of the latter. On awakening, we resume our
enterprise, take up our bodies, and become limited minds again. We
meet and converse with those bodies which we have previously animated.
There is a moment in the dawn when the darkness of the night is
dissipated, and before the exhalations of the day begin to rise, when
we see all things more truly than at any other time. The light is more
trustworthy, since our senses are pure and the atmosphere is less
gross. By afternoon, all objects are seen in mirage."
All men are spiritualists in finer or coarser manners, as temperament
and teaching dictate and determine,--the spiritual world revealing
itself accordingly. Speculation has in all ages delighted itself in
this preternatural realm from whence have risen the ghosts of realties
too unsubstantial and fugitive for ordinary senses to apprehend.
Whatever the facts, they receive interpretation according to the
spirit and intelligence of the believer. The past is full of such
prodigies and phenomena, for whose solution all learning, sacred and
profane, is revived in its turn. It appears that like opinions have
their rounds to run, like theories with their disciples, reappearing
in all great crises of thought, and reaching a fuller solution at each
succeeding period. A faith, were such possible, destitute of an element
of preternaturalism, or of mysticism, pure or mixed, could not gain
general acceptance. Some hold on the invisible connects the known with
unknown, yet leaving the copula to be divined. We define it on our lips
when we pronounce the word Person, and so approach, as near as we may,
to the "I Am" of things.
Unseen our spirits move, are such,
So eager they to clasp, they feel, they touch
While yet our bodies linger, cannot speed
The distance that divides, confines their need.