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Page 64
Like respiration, they are partly under our control, but that does not
affect the problem. Who runs them when we do not run them, even when we
try to stop them that we may get to sleep? Even when, after they have
yielded to our entreaties to stop, and we are asleep, they begin going
again--without our will. The only probability I can make out is that our
thinking is run by a power not ourselves, as much as our other partly
involuntary functions.
To hold that a man does his own dreaming--that it is done by a secondary
layer of his own consciousness--is to hold that we are made up of layers
of consciousness, of which the poorest layer is that of what we call our
waking life, and the better layers are at our service only in our
dreams--that when a man is asleep or mad he can solve problems, compose
music, create pictures, to which, when awake and in his sober senses, and
in a condition to profit by his work, and give profit from it, he is
inadequate.
Nay more, the theory claims that a man's working consciousness--his
self--the only self known to him or the world, will hold and shape his
life by a set of convictions which, in sleep, he will _himself_ prove
wrong, and thereby revolutionize his philosophy and his entire life.
Wouldn't it be more reasonable to attribute all such results--the
solutions of the problems, the music, the pictures, the corrections of the
errors--to a power outside himself?
I cannot believe that there's anything in my individual consciousness
which my experience or that of my ancestors has not placed there--in raw
material at least; or that in working up that raw material _I_ can exert
any genius in my sometimes chaotic dreams that I cannot exert in my
systematized waking hours. All the people I meet and talk with in my
dreams _may_ have been met and talked with by me or my forebears, though I
don't believe it; but the works of art I see have not been known to me or
my ancestors or any other mortal; nor have I any sign of the genius to
combine whatever elements of them I may have seen, into any such designs.
And when in dreams _other_ persons tell me things contrary to my firmest
convictions, in which things I later discover germs of most important
workable truth, the persons who tell me that, and who are different from
me as far as fairly decent persons can differ from each other, are
certainly not, as the good Du Prel would have us believe, myself. All
these things are not figments of _my_ mind--if they are figments of a
mind, it's a mind bigger than mine. The biggest claim I can make, or
assent to anybody else making, is that my mind is telepathically receptive
of the product of that greater mind.
Here are some farther evidences of the greater mind, given by Lombroso
(_After Death, What?_, 320 f.):
It is well known that in his dreams Goethe solved many weighty
scientific problems and put into words many most beautiful verses.
So also La Fontaine (_The Fable of Pleasures_) and Coleridge and
Voltaire. Bernard Palissy had in a dream the inspiration for one
of his most beautiful ceramic pieces....
Holde composed while in a dream _La Phantasie_, which reflects in
its harmony its origin; and Nodier created _Lydia_, and at the
same time a whole theory on the future of dreaming. Condillac in
dream finished a lecture interrupted the evening before. Kruger,
Corda, and Maignan solved in dreams mathematical problems and
theorems. Robert Louis Stevenson, in his _Chapters on Dreams_,
confesses that portions of his most original novels were composed
in the dreaming state. Tartini had while dreaming one of his most
portentous musical inspirations. He saw a spectral form
approaching him. It is Beelzebub in person. He holds a magic
violin in his hands, and the sonata begins. It is a divine adagio,
melancholy-sweet, a lament, a dizzy succession of rapid and
intense notes. Tartini rouses himself, leaps out of bed, seizes
his violin, and reproduces all that he had heard played in his
sleep. He names it the _Sonata del Diavolo_,...
Giovanni Dupr� got in a dream the conception of his very beautiful
_Piet�_. One sultry summer day Dupr� was lying on a divan thinking
hard on what kind of pose he should choose for the Christ. He fell
asleep, and in dream he saw the entire group at last complete,
with Christ in the very pose he had been aspiring to conceive, but
which his mind had not succeeded in completely realizing.
It is a quite frequent experience that a person perplexed by a problem at
night finds it solved on waking in the morning. Efforts to remember, which
are unsuccessful before going to sleep, on waking are often found
accomplished.
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