For it is the remembered dream alone that is incoherent—­the dream that comes clothed in the rags and trappings of this work-a-day world, and so leaves some recoverable record on the brain.  We all feel that the dreams we cannot remember are the most wonderful.  Who has not wakened with the sense of some incommunicable experience of terror or felicity, too strange and poignant to submit itself to concrete symbolization, and so is groped for by the memory in vain?  We know that dreams grow more ordered and significant as they recede from the surface of consciousness to its depths.  Deep sleep dreams are in the true sense clairvoyant, though for the most part irrecoverable—­ “Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook?” DuPrel and others have shown that the difference between ordinary dreaming, somnambulance, trance and ecstasy, is only a matter of redistribution of thresholds—­that they are all related states and merge into one another.  We have, therefore, every right to believe that for a certain number of hours out of the twenty-four we are all sybils and seers, however little most of us are able to profit by it.  Infrequently, in moments of peculiar susceptibility, the veil is lifted, but the art of dreaming true remains for the most part unmastered—­one of the precious gifts which the future holds in store for the sons and daughters of men.

The partial waking state is the soil in which remembered dreams develop most luxuriously.  Paradoxical as it may sound, they are the product, not of our sleep, but of our waking.  Such dreams belong to both worlds, partly to the three-dimensional and partly to the four-dimensional.  While dreams are often only a hodge-podge of daytime experiences, their incredible rapidity, alien to that experience, gives us our first faint practicable intimation of a higher development of time.

TIME IN DREAMS

The unthinkable velocity of time in dreams may be inferred from the fact that between the moment of impact of an impression at the sense-periphery and its reception at the center of consciousness—­moments so closely compacted that we think of them as simultaneous—­a coherent series of representations may take place, involving what seem to be protracted periods for their unfoldment.  Every reader will easily call to mind dream experiences of this character, in which the long-delayed denouement was suggested and prepared for by some extraneous sense-impression, showing that the entire dream drama unfolded within the time it took that impression to travel from the skin to the brain.