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Page 62
Now apparently among the accomplishments of a personality, does not
_necessarily_ inhere that of depressing a scale x pounds: for when that
capacity is entirely absent, from the apparent personalities who visit us
in the dream state, they can impress us in every other way, even to all
the reciprocities of sex. But for some reasons not yet understood, with
ordinary dreamers these impressions are not as congruous, persistent,
recurrent, or regulable in the dream life as in the waking life. But with
Mrs. Piper, Hodgson after his death, and especially G.P. and others, were
about as persistent and consistent associates as anybody living, barring
the fact that they could not show themselves over an hour or two at a
time, which was the limit of the medium's psychokinetic power, on which
their manifestations depended. But that these personalities are not in
time to be evolved so that they will be more permanent and consistent with
dreamers generally, would be a contradiction to at least some of the
implications of evolution.
* * * * *
Accepting provisionally the identity of a postcarnate life with the life
indicated in dreams, are there any further indications of its nature?
There are some, which may lend some slight confirmation to the theory of
identity.
It seems to show itself not only in the visions of the sensitives, but in
the dream life of all of us. If Mrs. Piper's dream state (I name her only
as a type) is really one of communication with souls who have passed into
a new life, dream states generally may not extravagantly be supposed to be
foretastes of that life. And so far as concerns their desirability, why
should they not be? Our ordinary dreams are, like the dreams of the
sensitives, superior to time, space, matter and force--to all the trammels
of our waking environment and powers. In dreams we experience unlimited
histories, and pass over unlimited spaces, in an instant; see, hear, feel,
touch, taste, smell, enjoy unlimited things; walk, swim, fly, change
things, with unlimited ease; do things with unlimited power; make what we
will--music, poetry, objects of art, situations, dramas, with unlimited
faculty, and enjoy unlimited society. Unless we have eaten too much, or
otherwise got ourselves out of order in the waking life, in the dream life
we seldom if ever know what it is to be too late for anything, or too far
from anything; we freely fall from chimneys or precipices, and I suppose
it will soon be aeroplanes, with no worse consequences than comfortably
waking up into the everyday world; we sometimes solve the problems which
baffle us here; we see more beautiful things than we see here; and, far
above all, we resume the ties that are broken here.
The indications seem to be that if we ever get the hang of that life, we
can have pretty much what we like, and eliminate what we don't
like--continue what we enjoy, and stop what we suffer--find no bars to
congeniality, or compulsion to boredom. To good dreamers it is unnecessary
to offer proof of any of these assertions, and to prove them to others is
impossible.
The dream life contains so much more beauty, so much fuller emotion, and
such wider reaches than the waking life, that one is tempted to regard it
as the real life, to which the waking life is somehow a necessary
preliminary. So orthodox believers regard the life after death as the real
life: yet most of their hopes regarding that life--even the strongest hope
of rejoining lost loved ones--are realized here during the brief throbs of
the dream life.
There seems to be no happiness from association in our ordinary life which
is not obtainable, by some people at least, from association in the dream
life. And as this appears to exist between incarnate A and postcarnate B,
there is at least a suggestion that it may exist between postcarnate A and
postcarnate B, and to a degree vastly more clear and abiding than during
the present discrepancy between the incarnate and postcarnate conditions?
This of course assumes, that B's appearance in A's dream life, just as he
appeared on earth (though, as I know to be the case, sometimes wiser,
healthier, jollier, and more lovable generally), is something more than a
mild attack of dyspepsia on the part of A.
Dreams do not seem to abound in work, and are often said not to abound in
morality, but I know that they sometimes do--in morality higher than any
attainable in our waking life. Certainly the scant vague indications from
the dream suggestions of a future life do not necessarily preclude
abundant work and morality, any more than work and sundry self-denials are
precluded on a holiday because one does not happen to perform them.
Moreover, the hoped-for future conditions may not contain the necessities
for either labor or self-restraint that present conditions do: they may
not be the same dangers there as here in the _dolce far niente_, or in
Platonic friendships.
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