We find a confirmation of this view in dream phenomena. But however
good the evidence, we shall fail to make out a case unless dream
experiences are conceded to be as real as any other. The reluctance
we may have to make this concession comes first from the purely
subjective character of dreams, and secondly from their triviality
and irrationality--it is as though the muddy sediment of daytime
thought and feeling and that alone were there cast forth. In answer
to the first objection, advanced psychology affirms that the
subconscious mind, from which dreams arise, approaches more nearly
to the omniscience of true being than the rational mind of waking
experience. The triviality and irrationality of dreams are
sufficiently accounted for if the dream state is thought of as the
meeting place of two conditions of consciousness: the foam and
flotsam "of perilous seas in faëry lands forlorn," whose vastitude,
whose hidden life, and rich argosies of experience, can only be
inferred from the fret of the tide on their nether shore--the tired
brain in sleep.
For it is the _remembered_ dream alone that is incoherent--the dream
that comes clothed in the rags and trappings of this work-a-day world,
and so leaves some recoverable record on the brain. We all feel that
the dreams we cannot remember are the most wonderful. Who has not
wakened with the sense of some incommunicable experience of terror or
felicity, too strange and poignant to submit itself to concrete
symbolization, and so is groped for by the memory in vain? We know
that dreams grow more ordered and significant as they recede from
the surface of consciousness to its depths. Deep sleep dreams are in
the true sense clairvoyant, though for the most part irrecoverable--
"Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook?" DuPrel and others have
shown that the difference between ordinary dreaming, somnambulance,
trance and ecstasy, is only a matter of redistribution of
thresholds--that they are all related states and merge into one
another. We have, therefore, every right to believe that for a
certain number of hours out of the twenty-four we are all sybils and
seers, however little most of us are able to profit by it.
Infrequently, in moments of peculiar susceptibility, the veil is
lifted, but the art of _dreaming true_ remains for the most part
unmastered--one of the precious gifts which the future holds in store
for the sons and daughters of men.
The partial waking state is the soil in which remembered dreams
develop most luxuriously. Paradoxical as it may sound, they are the
product, not of our sleep, but of our waking. Such dreams belong to
both worlds, partly to the three-dimensional and partly to the
four-dimensional. While dreams are often only a hodge-podge of
daytime experiences, their incredible rapidity, alien to that
experience, gives us our first faint practicable intimation of a
higher development of time.