subsequent to that date. This publication is made in accordance
with the author's last wishes. (Ed.)
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them as the product of incomplete and disjointed cerebral function.
But the most remarkable features of the experiences I am about to
record are the methodical consecutiveness of their sequences, and
the intelligent purpose disclosed alike in the events witnessed and
in the words heard or read. Some of these last, indeed, resemble,
for point and profundity, the apologues of Eastern scriptures; and,
on more than one occasion, the scenery of the dream has accurately
portrayed characteristics of remote regions, city, forest and mountain,
which in this existence at least I have never beheld, nor, so far
as I can remember, even heard described, and yet, every feature
of these unfamiliar climes has revealed itself to my sleeping vision
with a splendour of coloring and distinctness of outline which made
the waking life seem duller and less real by contrast. I know of
no parallel to this phenomenon unless in the pages of Bulwer Lytton's
romance entitled--"The Pilgrims of the Rhine," in which is related
the story of a German student endowed with so marvellous a faculty
of dreaming, that for him the normal conditions of sleeping and
waking became reversed, his true life was that which he lived in
his slumbers, and his hours of wakefulness appeared to him as so
many uneventful and inactive intervals of arrest occurring in an
existence of intense and vivid interest which was wholly passed
in the hypnotic state. Not that to me there is any such inversion
of natural conditions. On the contrary, the priceless insights
and illuminations I have acquired by means of my dreams have gone
far to elucidate for me many difficulties and enigmas of life, and
even of religion, which might otherwise have remained dark to me,