The dictionary tells us that a dream is a train of vagrant ideas which present themselves to the mind while we are asleep.

We know that the principal feature, when we are dreaming, is the absence of our control over the current of thought, so that the principal of suggestion has an unlimited sway. There is usually a complete want of coherency in the images that appear in dreams, but when we are dreaming this does not seem to cause any surprise.

Occasionally, however, intellectual efforts are made during sleep which would be difficult to surpass when awake.

It is said that Condillac often brought to a conclusion in his dreams, reasonings on which he had been employed during the day; and that Franklin believed that he had been often instructed in his dreams concerning the issue of events which at that time occupied his mind. Coleridge composed from two to three hundred lines during a dream; the beautiful fragment of "Kubla Khan," which was all he had committed to paper when he awoke, remaining as a specimen of that dream poem.

The best thought points to the fact that dreams depend on natural causes. They generally take their rise and character from internal bodily impressions or from something in the preceding state of body or mind. They are, therefore, retrospe tive and resultant, instead of being prospective or prophetic. The latter opinion has, however, prevailed in all ages and among all nations, and hence the common practice of divination or prophesying by dreams, that is, interpreting them as indications of coming events.