On some of the phenomena of sleep and dream : read at the meeting of the Psychological Society of Great Britain, May 12, 1875 / by Mr. Serjeant Cox.

  • Cox, Edward W. (Edward William), 1809-1879.
Date:
[1875]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On some of the phenomena of sleep and dream : read at the meeting of the Psychological Society of Great Britain, May 12, 1875 / by Mr. Serjeant Cox. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    impossibilities with the utmost complacency. It makes no comparison between the present object and its recol- lections of the past and the reasoning faculty is not em- ployed to try the truth of the present appearances. In what, then, does the sleeping mind differ from the leaking mind ? First, you have lost your control over the action of the mental faculties. Your Will has ceased to direct them. Hence their dislocation and the disorder that attends their actions. But you are still conscious. You know that it is yourself that is dreaming the dream. Although the dream creates in you no surprise, you never for an instant lose your con- sciousness of your own individuality—that it is yourself that is playing the part in the dream drama. Never do you suppose yourself to be some other person. You may dream that you are a king or a beggar, but it is yourself that has risen or fallen. Your consciousness and conviction of identity remain unshaken amid all the impossibilities with which your ideal existence is encompassed by the fictions of your own making. Is not this another proof that you, the dreamer, are not the thing that makes the dream (for you cannot be both cause and consequence), but only the recipient of the impression of the dream from the mechanism that makes the dream ? If, then, the individual consciousness continues awake, thereat of the condition of dream is to be sought in some part of the process of mental action between the presenta- tion of an idea and the impression of it upon the conscious- ness. What is wanting here ? There are two processes by which the waking mind is governed. The Intelligent Self forms the desire, and the Will is the instrument or power by which that desire is accomplished. [48]