Dream, the thoughts or series of thoughts which occupy the mind during sleep. Locke expresses the opinion that we do not always think when wo sleep; but most modern philosophers, following Plato and the Platonists, are agreed that the mind is never dormant, but that consciousness continues uninterruptedly during sleep. Leibnitz rejects Locke's position, and Kant maintains that we always dream when asleep; that to cease to dream would bo to cease to live, and that those who fancy they have not dreamed have only forgotten their dream. Sir William Hamilton argues that the mind is never wholly inactive, and that wo are never entirely unconscious of its activity. Ho quotes from Jouffroy as follows: "I have never well understood those who admit that in sleep the mind is dormant. When we dream, wo are assuredly asleep, and assuredly also our mind is not asleep, because it thinks; it is therefore manifest that the mind frequently wakes when the senses are in slumber. But this does not prove that it never sleeps along with them. To sleep is for the mind not to dream; and it is impossible to establish the fact that there are in sleep moments in which the mind does not dream.

To have no recollection of our dreams does not prove that we have not dreamed; for it can often be proved that we have dreamed, although the dream has left no trace on our memory." Dreams, no less than our waking thoughts, are dependent on the laws of association, and the senses may be considered as the media through which the spirit within is brought into contact with the external world. Although in sleep the senses generally are torpid, some of them continue to transmit to the mind imperfect sensations which they receive. Of the five external senses, sight is the least excitable during sleep; and next in order, in proportion to their degree of excitability, come taste, smell, hearing, and touch; the last being the most excitable, and causing or modifying dreams oftener than any of the others. Dr. Gregory, having applied a bottle of hot water to his feet on going to bed, dreamed that he was making a journey to Mount Etna, and found the heat insufferable. Dr. Reid, having had a blister put upon his head, dreamed that he was scalped by Indians. M. Giron de Buzereingues made a scries of experiments to test how far he could determine his dreams at will by operating upon the mind through the senses.

With this view he left his knees uncovered, and dreamed that he was travelling at night in a diligence with a vivid impression of cold knees produced by the rigor of the weather. Waller relates the case of a gentleman who was a victim of terror on account of a dream, which he could never look upon except as a real occurrence. He was lying in bed, and as he imagined quite awake, when he felt the distinct impression of a hand placed upon his shoulder, which produced such a state of alarm that he durst not move in bed. The shoulder which had experienced the impression had been uncovered, and the cold to which it was exposed produced the sensation. Persons in whom one of the senses is defective frequently have their dreams modified by this circumstance. Darwin relates the case of a deaf gentleman who in his dreams always appeared to converse by means of the fingers or in writing. He never had the impression of hearing speech, and for the same reason one who has been blind from his birth never dreams of visible objects. The condition of the digestive apparatus has a very marked influence on dreams.

When the functions of the digestive organs are properly performed, the dreams, if affected at all from this cause, are pleasant; if however any disturbance exists in this part of the system, the dreams are apt to be painful, usually proportioned in intensity to the amount of disturbance of the alimentary canal. To this class of sensations may be referred those dreams produced by the use of opium and intoxicating drinks, which in part at least act by the impression made upon the digestive organs. Dreams induced by this cause are remarkable for the extravagance of the phantasmagoria they exhibit, frequently presenting shapes the most fugitive and fanciful. The dreamer often seems endowed with such elasticity that it appears as if he could easily mount to and float upon the clouds above him. De Quincey, in the "Confessions of an Opium Eater," has portrayed most vividly the effects of that narcotic in the production of dreams. But it does not require the aid of a narcotic as powerful as opium, or indeed anything beyond what ordinarily occurs in a state of dreaming, to create ideas of time and space apparently as incongruous as those narrated by the opium eater.

The sleeper who is suddenly awakened by a loud rap does not begin and terminate his dream with this simple occurrence, but experiences a long train of events requiring hours and even days for their fulfilment, all evidently occasioned by the sound which awakens him, and concentrated within the brief space of time it occupies. A person who was suddenly aroused from sleep by a few drops of water sprinkled in his face, dreamed of the events of an entire life in which happiness and sorrow were mingled, and which finally terminated with an altercation upon the borders of a lake, into which his exasperated companion, after a considerable struggle, succeeded in plunging him. It is evident that the association of ideas in this case which produced the lake, the altercation, and the sudden plunge, was occasioned by the water sprinkled upon the face, and the presumption is probable that the whole machinery of an entire life was due to the same cause. Dr. Abercrombie relates a similar case of a gentleman who dreamed that he had enlisted as a soldier, joined his regiment, deserted, was apprehended, carried back, tried, condemned to be shot, and led out to execution.

After the usual preparations a gun was fired, and he awoke with the report to discover that the cause of his disturbance was a noise in the adjacent room. Kant says we can dream more in a minute than we can act during a day, and that the great rapidity of the train of thought in sleep is one of the principal causes why we do not always recollect what we dream. Dreams are often produced by the waking associations which precede them; and the most recent associations occur the most frequently in our dreams. So, too, dreams are often characteristic of the peculiar idiosyncrasies of the dreamers: a miser dreams of his gold, a philosopher of science, a merchant of his ventures, the musician of melody, and the lover of his mistress. Tartini, a distinguished violin player, is said to have composed his "Devil's Sonata" under the inspiration of a dream, in which the devil appeared to him and invited him to a trial of skill upon his own instrument, which he accepted, and awoke with the music of the sonata so vividly impressed upon his mind that he had no difficulty in committing it to paper. In like manner Coleridge professes to have composed his poem "Kubla Khan" in a dream.

He had, he says, taken an anodyne prescribed for a slight indisposition, and fell asleep in his chair while reading in Purchas's "Pilgrimage" of a palace built by Khan Kubla. He continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, and awoke with a vivid impression that he had composed from 200 to 300 lines of verse. He at once wrote the fragment as it is now preserved. At this point he was called out to attend to some business. When he returned, after an absence of more than an hour, the poem, with the exception of a few scattered lines and images, had vanished from his memory. Instances like the above occasionally occur where the mind in a state of waking is aided by the processes carried on during sleep. Condillac, says Cabanis, often brought to a conclusion in his dreams reasonings which he had not completely worked out on retiring to bed; and Condorcet saw in dreams the final steps of a calculation which had baffled him when awake. But such cases are rare. As a general rule dreams are wanting in coherence and unsubstantial in reasoning. Nothing is more common than for the mind in dreams to blend together objects and events which could not have an associated existence in reality. We never dream of a past event as past.

The faces of friends long: dead and events long past rise before the mind with all the vividness of real existence, and fail to excite surprise by their incongruity, because, says Dr. Hartley, "we have no other reality to oppose to the ideas which offer themselves, whereas in the common fictions of the fancy, while we are awake, there is always a set of real external objects striking some of our senses and precluding a like mistake there.....

Secondly, the trains of visible ideas which occur in dreams are far more vivid than common visible ideas, and therefore may the more easily be taken for actual impressions." - The popular belief that in dreams an insight is frequently given of coming events is shared by many well informed persons, and is supposed to be corroborated by many remarkable cases. Some of the* instances recorded may be explained by natural means. Franklin believed that he was instructed supernaturally in his dreams concerning the issue of current events. "He observed not," says Cabanis, "that his profound skill and rare sagacity continued to direct the action of his brain during sleep." The dream of Albumaron, the Arabian physician, to whom his lately deceased friend suggested in his sleep " a very sovereign remedy for his sore eyes," is explicable in a similar way. But there are extraordinary instances which cannot be explained by any known natural laws. Many of these are so well authenticated that they cannot be discredited, however loath we may be to accord to them a supernatural origin. - The earliest mention of dreams is in the Scriptures and in the poems of Homer, in both of which a supernatural origin is generally ascribed to them.

By the ancients, indeed, dreams were almost universally regarded as coming from the other world, and from both good and evil sources. A great number of instances are on record in the Greek and Latin classics of remarkable dreams. The night before the assassination of Julius Caesar, his wife Calpurnia dreamed that her husband fell bleeding across her knees. On the night that Attila died, the emperor Marcian at Constantinople dreamed that he saw the bow of the Hunnish conqueror broken asunder. Cicero relates a story of two Arcadians, who, travelling together, arrived at Megara and went to separate lodgings, one to an inn, the other to a private house. In the course of the night the latter dreamed that his friend appeared to him and begged for help because the innkeeper was preparing to murder him. The dreamer awoke, but, not considering the matter worthy of attention, went to sleep again. A second time his friend appeared, telling him that assistance would be too late, for the murder had already been committed. The murdered person also said that his body had been put into a cart and covered with manure, and that an attempt would be made to take it out of the city the next morning.

The dreamer went to the magistrates and had the cart searched, when the body was found and the murderer brought to justice. Dreams were even allowed to influence legislation. During the Marsic war (90 B. C.) the Roman senate ordered the temple of Juno Sospita to be rebuilt in consequence of a dream of Caecilia Metella, the wife of the consul Appius Claudius Pulcher. Some of the fathers of the Christian church attached considerable importance to dreams. Tertullian thought they came from God as one species of prophecy, though many dreams may be attributed to the agency of demons. He believed that future honors and dignities, medical remedies, thefts, and treasures had been occasionally revealed by dreams. St. Augustine relates a dream by which Genna-dius, a Carthaginian physician, was convinced of the immortality of the soul, by the apparition to him in his sleep of a young man. who reasoned with him on the subject, and argued that as he could see when his bodily eyes were closed in sleep, so he would find that when his bodily senses were extinct in death he would see and hear and feel with the senses of his spirit. - Aristotle wrote a treatise on dreams as did also Artemidorus and Astrampsychus. Of late works, Dr. W. B. Carpenter's "Physiology" may be consulted with advantage; also Maury's Le sommcil et les reves (Paris, 1861); Brierre de Boismont's Des hallucinations, ou histoire raisonnee des apparitions, des visions, des songes, de Vex-tase, des reves, du magnetisme et du somnambu-lisme (Paris, 3d ed., 1861); and Maudsley's "Physiology and Pathology of the Mind" (London, 1867).