'A time shall come (said he)
when thine eyes shall refuse to assist thee in contemplating these
wonders.'"
We shall now proceed to notice the subject of dreams in another point of
view--that is, as being employed as a medium of divination in the cure
of diseases, in which the fancies of the brain appear, in reality, to as
little advantage as they do with reference to any other considerations
in which such pretended omens exist.
FOOTNOTES:
[81] Wolfius, Psychol. Empir. Sect. 123.
[82] Mem. de l'acad. de Berlin, tom. ii. p. 316.
[83] Arist. de insomn. cap 3.
[84] Quae in vita usurpant homines, cogitant, curant, vident quaeque
agunt vigilantes, agitantque, ea cuique in somno accidunt. _De Div._
[85] Essay on Human Understanding, book, chap. i. sect 17.
[86] Obs, on Man, vol. 1, sect. 5.
[87] There is a phenomenon in the mind, which, though it happen to us
while we are perfectly awake, yet approaches the nearest to sleep of any
I know. It is called the _Reverie_, or, as some term it, the _brown
study_, a sort of middle state between waking and sleeping; in which,
though our eyes are open, our senses seem to be entirely shut up, and we
are quite insensible of every thing about us, yet we are all the while
engaged in a musing indolence of thought, or a supine and lolling kind
of roving from one fairy scene to another, without any self-command;
from which, if any noise or accident rouse us, we wake as from a real
dream, and are often as much at a loss to tell how our thoughts were
employed, as if we had waked from the soundest sleep.
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