Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/357

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NOUMENA.
335

esting for what they intrinsically are. For they are twilights of thought, the dawn glimmerings of inner light before that be risen above the horizon of full sensibility. This half-way state of mind throws not a little light on clearer states of consciousness by comparison.

Dreams betray a midway condition of mental activity, where action has reached the point of conscious internal, but not yet of conscious external, discharge. Our dream-life takes place in an ideal world within, upon which any outer sensation is permitted to enter only under some disguise. Whence the visitant came we are not aware, for we only take cognizance of it after it has donned a transformation to suit the mental scene it finds there. Our body may perchance turn over in bed, but in consequence we gracefully float from the top of a precipice to the bottom, and find ourselves unharmed.

The next peculiarity idiosyncratic of dreams consists in their seemingly rational irrationality. In our dreams the most unlikely people do the most impossible things, in the most easy, credible manner. A thread of apparent causation connects one act with the