The dream life contains so much more beauty, so much fuller emotion, and such wider reaches than the waking life, that one is tempted to regard it as the real life, to which the waking life is somehow a necessary preliminary.  So orthodox believers regard the life after death as the real life:  yet most of their hopes regarding that life—­even the strongest hope of rejoining lost loved ones—­are realized here during the brief throbs of the dream life.

There seems to be no happiness from association in our ordinary life which is not obtainable, by some people at least, from association in the dream life.  And as this appears to exist between incarnate A and postcarnate B, there is at least a suggestion that it may exist between postcarnate A and postcarnate B, and to a degree vastly more clear and abiding than during the present discrepancy between the incarnate and postcarnate conditions?  This of course assumes, that B’s appearance in A’s dream life, just as he appeared on earth (though, as I know to be the case, sometimes wiser, healthier, jollier, and more lovable generally), is something more than a mild attack of dyspepsia on the part of A.

Dreams do not seem to abound in work, and are often said not to abound in morality, but I know that they sometimes do—­in morality higher than any attainable in our waking life.  Certainly the scant vague indications from the dream suggestions of a future life do not necessarily preclude abundant work and morality, any more than work and sundry self-denials are precluded on a holiday because one does not happen to perform them.  Moreover, the hoped-for future conditions may not contain the necessities for either labor or self-restraint that present conditions do:  they may not be the same dangers there as here in the dolce far niente, or in Platonic friendships.

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Men are not consistent in their attitude regarding dreams.  They admit the dream state to be ideal—­constantly use such expressions as “A dream of loveliness,” “Happier than I could even dream,” “Surpasses my fondest dreams,” and yet on the other hand they call its experience “but the baseless vision of a dream.”  What do they mean by “baseless”?  Certainly it is not lack of vividness or emotional intensity.  It is probably the lack of duration in the happy experiences, and of the possibility of remembering them, and, still more, of enjoying similar ones at will.  Yet the sensitives do both in recurrent instalments of the dream life, and like the rest of us, through the intervening waking periods, after the first hour or so, generally know nothing of the dreams.  It is not vividness of the dream life itself that is lacking, but vividness in our memories of it.  James defines our waking personality as the stream of consciousness:  the dream life gives no such stream.  To-night does not continue last night as to-day continues yesterday.  The dream life is not like a stream, but more like a series, though