Surely we should bear in mind, in any considera- tion of such a question, the infinite condescension involved in God's speaking to man througli any medium of communication. There is a .sense in which it is derogatory to God to suppose Him to hold any commerce with man at all, particularly with sinful man. If we realized, as we should, the distance which separates the infinite and infinitely holy God from sin-stricken humanity. We should be little inclined to raise questions witli respect to the relative condescension involved in His ap- proaching us in these or those particular circum- stances. In any revelation which God makes to man He stoops infinitely— and there are no degrees in the infinite. God's thoughts are not as our thoughts, and the clothing of His messages in the forms of human conception and language involves an infinite derogation. Looked' at sub specie mter- iritatis, the difference between God's approaching man through the medium of a dream or through the medium of his waking apprehension, shrinks into practical nothingness. The cry of the heart which has really seen or heard God must in any
case be, ' What is man, that thou art mindful of him ? or the son of man, that thou visitest liira ? '
It should also be kept clearly in view that the subject of dreams, too, is, after all, the human spirit. It is the same soul that is active in the waking consciousness which is active also in the dream-consciousness, — the same soul acting accord- ing to the same laws (cf. Lehmann, op. cit. p. 397). No doubt there are some dreams which we should find difficulty in believing were direct inspirations of God. Are there not some waking thoughts also of which the same may be said? This does not in the least suggest that the Divine Spirit may not on suitable occasion enter into the dream-conscious- ness, as into the waking, and impress upon it, with that force of conviction which He alone knows how to produce, the assurance of His presence and the terms of His message.
'The psychologj' of dreams and \isions,' writes Dr. 0. T. Ladd, ' so far as we can speak of such a psycholopry, furnishes us with neither sutficient motive nor sufficient means for denying the truth of the Bibhcal narratives. On the contrary, there are certain grounds for confirming the truth of some of these narrati\es. . . . Even in ordinary dreams, the dreamer is still tile iRiiiKui soul. The soul acts, then, even in dreaming, as a
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So little, indeed, do emptiness and disorder enter into the very essence of dreaming, that com- mon experience supplies innumerable examples of dreams thoroughly coherent and consequent. The literature of the subject is filled with instances in which even a heightened activity of human faculty is exhibited in dreams, and that through- out every department of mental endowment. Jurists have in their dreams prepared briefs of which they have been only too glad to avail them- selves in their waking hours ; statesmen have in their dreams obtained their best insight into policy ; lecturers have elaborated their discourses ; mathe- maticians solved their most puzzling problems ; authors composed their most admired productions ; artists worked out their most inspired motives. Dr. Franklin told Cabanis that the bearings and issues of political events which had baffled his inquisition when aw'ake were not infrequently unfolded to him in his dreams. It was in a dream that Reinhold worked out his table of categories. Condorcet informs us that he often completed his imperfect calculations in his dreams ; and the same experience has been shared by many other mathe- maticians, as, for example, by \raignan, GiJns, Wiihnert. Condillac, when engaged upon his Cours d'Etudes, repeatedly developed and finished in his dreams a subject which he had broken ott'on retir- ing to rest. The story of the origin of Coleridge's Ktibla Khan in a dream is well known. Possibly no more instructive instance is on record, however, than the account given by Robert Louis Stevenson, in his delightful Chapter on Dreams ('Thistle' ed. of Works, XV. 250 flf.), of how 'the little people' of his brain, who had been wont to amuse him with absurd farragos, harnessed themselves to their task and dreamed for him consecutively and artistically when he became a craftsman in the art of .story-telling. Now, they trimmed and pared their dream-stories, and set them on all fours, and made them run from a beginning to an end, and fitted them to tlie laws of life, and even filled them witli dramatic situations of guileful art, making the conduct of the actors psychologically correct, and aptly graduating the emotion up to the climax. (See Abercrombie, Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers, etc., part iii. § iv., esp. pp.
DREAM
497
216-221 ; Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physi- ology, p. 524 f. ; Lehraann as cited, p. 411 ; Vol- kelt, Die Traumphantasie, No. 15 ; Myers, fftmian Personality, etc., Nos. 417 f., 430, with correspond- ing Appendixes).
Instances of this heightened mental action in dreams are so numerous and so striking in fact, that they have given rise to an hypothesis which provokes Wundt's scoff at those ' who are inclined to think that when we dream the mind has burst the fetters of the body, and that dream fancies transcend the activity of the waking conscious- ness, with its narrow confinement to the limita- tions of space and time ' ( Vorlesungen iiber die Menschen- unci Thierseele, Lect. xxii. pp. 366-370, Eng. tr. pp. 323-324). The well-known essay of Lange ' On the Double Consciousness, especially on the Night- Consciousness and its polar relation to the Day-Consciousness of Man,' printed in the Deutsclie Zeitschrift fur christliche Wissenschaft und christliches Leben for 1851 (Nos. 30, 31, and 32), stUl provides one of the most readable and in- structive statements of this theory. But English readers will be apt to turn for it first of all to the voluminous discussions of the late Mr. Frederic W. H. Myers, Human Personality and its Sur- vival of Bodily Death (London, 1903), where it is given a new statement on a fresh and more em- pirical basis. In Mr. Myers' view, the sleeping state is more plastic than the waking, exhibiting some trace ' of the soul's less exclusive absorption in the activity of the organism,' by which is possibly increased ' the soul's power of operating in that spiritual world to which sleep has drawn it nearer' (vol. i. pp. 151-152; cf. p. 135). Accord- ingly, 'these subliminal uprushes' which we call dreams, these ' bubbles breaking on the surface from the deep below,' may be counted upon to bring us messages, now and again, from a spiritual environment to which our waking consciousness is closed. On hypotheses like these it is often argued that the sleep'ing state is the most favourable for the reception of spiritual communications. It is not necessary to commit ourselves to such specula- tions. But their existence among investigators who have given close study to the phenomena of dreams, strongly suggests to us that those phe- nomena, in the mass, are not such as to exclude the possibility or the propriety of the occasional em- ployment by the Divine Spirit of dreams as vehicles of revelation.