Some more phenomena of sleep and dream : paper read to the Psychological Society of Great Britain / by the President, Mr. Serjeant Cox.

  • Cox, Edward W. (Edward William), 1809-1879.
Date:
[1877]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Some more phenomena of sleep and dream : paper read to the Psychological Society of Great Britain / by the President, 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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    as if they were realities—that is to say, they weave them into narratives, treat them as events, and cause them to create the appropriate emotions—whether sentiments or passions. It is also to be noted that, unlike ideas, which are imaginary, the passions and emotions are really felt in dream, not imagined to be felt; another proof that all the mental faculties are not sleeping. There is a condition nearly approaching to dream—inter- mediate between the active waking state and the active dreaming state, which may throw some light upon this matter, and help the inquiry so interesting to Psychology— what dream is ? The condition to which I refer is that known as Reverie. In reverie we do not sleep and yet are not quite awake. The senses are not suspended, as in sleep, | but they are at rest,—they take no active cognizance of external things. The attention of the mind in this con- dition is concentrated upon itself. We amuse ourselves with “ building castles in the air,” that is to say, the fancy furnishes a series of pictures which the Gonscious Self contemplates with pleasure and thus far it is the process of dreaming. But the mind-history invented in reverie, however improbable of realization, is rarely a manifest impossibility and never presents the absurd incongruities of a dream, nor is ever mistaken for reality. When reverie lapses into sleep and dream, although the physiological change is nothing more than the outflow of a small quantity of blood from the brain and the involuntary instead of the voluntary closing of the avenues of the senses, and is accomplished in one moment, the entire character of the self-created pictures is changed, and that which the instant before was orderly and rational, if not probable, becomes a mass of disorder and impossibility, and the consciousness of unreality changes into a confident belief that all is real. [176]