Now apparently among the accomplishments of a personality, does not necessarily inhere that of depressing a scale x pounds:  for when that capacity is entirely absent, from the apparent personalities who visit us in the dream state, they can impress us in every other way, even to all the reciprocities of sex.  But for some reasons not yet understood, with ordinary dreamers these impressions are not as congruous, persistent, recurrent, or regulable in the dream life as in the waking life.  But with Mrs. Piper, Hodgson after his death, and especially G.P. and others, were about as persistent and consistent associates as anybody living, barring the fact that they could not show themselves over an hour or two at a time, which was the limit of the medium’s psychokinetic power, on which their manifestations depended.  But that these personalities are not in time to be evolved so that they will be more permanent and consistent with dreamers generally, would be a contradiction to at least some of the implications of evolution.

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Accepting provisionally the identity of a postcarnate life with the life indicated in dreams, are there any further indications of its nature?  There are some, which may lend some slight confirmation to the theory of identity.

It seems to show itself not only in the visions of the sensitives, but in the dream life of all of us.  If Mrs. Piper’s dream state (I name her only as a type) is really one of communication with souls who have passed into a new life, dream states generally may not extravagantly be supposed to be foretastes of that life.  And so far as concerns their desirability, why should they not be?  Our ordinary dreams are, like the dreams of the sensitives, superior to time, space, matter and force—­to all the trammels of our waking environment and powers.  In dreams we experience unlimited histories, and pass over unlimited spaces, in an instant; see, hear, feel, touch, taste, smell, enjoy unlimited things; walk, swim, fly, change things, with unlimited ease; do things with unlimited power; make what we will—­music, poetry, objects of art, situations, dramas, with unlimited faculty, and enjoy unlimited society.  Unless we have eaten too much, or otherwise got ourselves out of order in the waking life, in the dream life we seldom if ever know what it is to be too late for anything, or too far from anything; we freely fall from chimneys or precipices, and I suppose it will soon be aeroplanes, with no worse consequences than comfortably waking up into the everyday world; we sometimes solve the problems which baffle us here; we see more beautiful things than we see here; and, far above all, we resume the ties that are broken here.

The indications seem to be that if we ever get the hang of that life, we can have pretty much what we like, and eliminate what we don’t like—­continue what we enjoy, and stop what we suffer—­find no bars to congeniality, or compulsion to boredom.  To good dreamers it is unnecessary to offer proof of any of these assertions, and to prove them to others is impossible.