As Macario says, "Many successful literary and scientific efforts have been inspired by an intellectual dream" (what he means by an "intellectual" dream in such context, goodness knows no doubt, and Macario may, but I do not. The translation is in the Medical Critic and Psychological Journal, for April, 1862). Galen and Hermas he quotes as having done great things by working on ideas that have come to them in dreams. That is conceivable enough. But when Seafield writes: "Thus Voltaire made a duplicate of the first canto of the Henriade; the Divina

Commedia is said to have been inspired by a dream; Coleridge's Kubla Khan was unquestionably (?) completed during a dream; and Tartini's Sonata du Diable is a plagiarism from a violin played by a dream - devil" - it seems very much easier to accept the explanation of the way in which the Divine Comedy is here stated to be due to a dream influence, than to accept the mode (not of suggestion by a dream but of actual creation in a dream, which Seafield seems to look on as synonymous) in which the last two compositions are said to have been made. The one is intelligible and conceivable, not contradicted by other dream experience; the latter idea is altogether opposite to such experience, and makes a very big demand, it priori, on credulity. Probably enough, it is that very abeyance of the rational faculty which puts criticism so much at fault in dreams, that permits to the dreaming thoughts their immense, their unrestricted range, a range untrammelled by the hard and fast laws of fact and possibilities, with the result that the dreams of some who are most prosaic thinkers in the waking state are marked by the most extensive flights of the imagination.

A striking instance, worth recording for the singularity of the dream itself, as well as its illustrative bearing on this general quality of dreams, occurred within the writer's knowledge. A friend of his, of most calm and philosophical cast of mind, dreaming that he saw his face in a mirror, was surprised to find it covered with grime. On nearer inspection he was yet more startled (with the mild, sub - normal surprise of the dream state) to see that each grime mark had the shape of a tiny handprint, the thumb mark in each print being a little defective. There was a basin handy, in which he washed his face, and the water forthwith became bemudded by the grime which gradually settled to the bottom of the basin, and, as it settled, made itself into the shape of many little hands perfectly formed save that each hand was a little defective by reason of a deformed and stunted thumb. My friend could think of no occasion of this dream, that shows imaginative power so strangely vivid. It is not easy to tell the extent to which novelists have drawn from their dream imagination, but probably their debt is considerable.

Avowedly Tur - genieff and Stevenson did so, and James Payn, as we have said, saw in a dream the main incident in the losing of Lost Sir Massingberd. Probably many another, likely enough without being aware to what extent, has drawn from the same source; and of course Alice, both in Wonderland and the Looking - glass, moves through pure and simple dreamland. But that is another matter from saying that the incidents were actually dreamed.

In investigating the stuff of our dreams, it is not always easy to remember that we must judge them, and account for them by other standards than we apply to our consideration of the working of our waking intellect It is this difficulty, I fancy, that led my friend to infer that there was within him a dual personality, only in evidence when he slept, of which the one individual was capable of talking pure Parisian. It is so impossible to say how we know, or think we know, our dream creations to be what they are. For instance, to quote another correspondent whose opinion deserves every consideration, we find ourselves in Harley Street; it is full of shops, yet we know that it is Harley Street; or in some other street, and we know it to be that street, and yet, instead of houses, there are the trunks of beech trees on either hand. In the logic - mongers language we have the "denotation," but the "connotation" is all adrift. We may suspect that my friend's purest Parisian was like the shops of Harley Street, which, when awake (if ever it is), has never a shop in its long dull length. This friend is one of the many who has known the dream within a dream, to me unknown.

That dream is worth transcribing, for the sake of the explanation that he suggests for it " I was chatting," is his account of the dream, " with a school friend, the scene a familiar walk by a river. We were smoking, and I relating something that had come into my life since I had seen him. Suddenly, feeling unaccountably drowsy, I said, 'Fred, old boy, the sun is unbearably hot, let's have a nap. I'll get under this bush.' The scene had changed, as it does in dreams. The bush was a whin, the river became bunkers and links, Fred turned into his brother George. This transformation did not affect me, and I laid myself under the whin and was asleep at once. In that sleep I had an inner dream, and though foggy and ill - defined I was able, at the breakfast table, to give some outline of it to those around." The explanation that my friend suggests is as follows: " that by some movement of an arm or body while in the original or normal dream, I had drawn the sheet over my head and become hot and half - suffocated; but being gradual, the sensation did not waken me.

The second dream must have been almost instantaneous, for I could not long have suffered the semi - asphyxiation, and when it could no longer be endured, by a motion of the arm I may have unveiled, as I had covered, my breathing apparatus, and burst into oxygen instead of carbonic acid gas."

The explanation, whether or no it be accepted, is ingenious.

Of course this matter of the dream within a dream is very subtle and we have to be careful lest we get into trouble with our phrases in trying to explain it I rather think that this is just what has happened to one of my correspondents who writes: " With regard to "double dreams'" - the kind that 1 have spoken of as "dreams within dreams" - "when a dream is experienced and then narrated in a second dream, are we sure there is such a thing? For instance, some mornings I seem to have dreamed of quarrelling with a relative, and then, in another dream, of meeting him and remarking about the first dream." (But surely this is simply an affair of two dreams, not of a dream within a dream. The dream within a dream means, if anything, that you dream you are dreaming - are dreaming there and then. The other seems only to mean that you dream about a previous dream, quite a different affair.) "But did the first dream," my correspondent continues, "really occur at all? Or had I not only one dream, that I met so and so and told him I had dreamt of quarrelling with him? The narration creates the supposed first dream.