of events which would ordinarily occupy many years is taking place before them. That which, under these circumstances, is accomplished in part by abstraction or external means, in dreams is done entirely by cutting off all possibility of estimating time or space.
The mind is supposed to move more rapidly in dreams than in waking thoughts. Dreams without doubt are more diversified and numerous than the waking thoughts of busy men and women absorbed in a particular routine of work, or in the necessary cares of the body, or in conversation circumscribed by conventional laws, the slow rate of speech, and the duty of listening. But it is an error to think that dream-images are more numerous than those of revery. In a single hour of revery one may see more images than he could fully describe in a volume of a thousand pages. It is as true of the waking as of the dreaming state, that
Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain,
Our thoughts are linked in many a hidden chain;
Wake but one, and lo! what myriads rise:
Each stamps its image as the other flies.
Apparent loss of identity in dreams, and finding one's self in impossible positions, are the result of the entire occupation of the perceptive faculties with one image at a time. A dream that a man is a clergyman may change into one that he is a general commanding on the field of battle, and he will see no incongruity. He may even imagine himself to be two persons at the same time, as in Dr. Johnson's case when he contended with a man, and was much chagrined to feel that his opponent had the better of him in wit. He was consoled, however, when on waking he perceived that he had furnished the wit for both.
