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Now to develop a little farther the time-honored hypothesis of a cosmic soul as explaining dreams, and supported by them.

Admit, provisionally at least, that the medium is merely an extraordinary dreamer.  Does a man do his own dreaming, or is it done for him?  Does a man do his own digesting, circulating, assimilating, or is it done for him?  If he does not do these things himself, who does?  About the physical functions through the sympathetic nerve, we answer unhesitatingly:  the cosmic force.  How, then, about the psychic functions?  Are they done by the cosmic psyche?

Like respiration, they are partly under our control, but that does not affect the problem.  Who runs them when we do not run them, even when we try to stop them that we may get to sleep?  Even when, after they have yielded to our entreaties to stop, and we are asleep, they begin going again—­without our will.  The only probability I can make out is that our thinking is run by a power not ourselves, as much as our other partly involuntary functions.

To hold that a man does his own dreaming—­that it is done by a secondary layer of his own consciousness—­is to hold that we are made up of layers of consciousness, of which the poorest layer is that of what we call our waking life, and the better layers are at our service only in our dreams—­that when a man is asleep or mad he can solve problems, compose music, create pictures, to which, when awake and in his sober senses, and in a condition to profit by his work, and give profit from it, he is inadequate.

Nay more, the theory claims that a man’s working consciousness—­his self—­the only self known to him or the world, will hold and shape his life by a set of convictions which, in sleep, he will himself prove wrong, and thereby revolutionize his philosophy and his entire life.  Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to attribute all such results—­the solutions of the problems, the music, the pictures, the corrections of the errors—­to a power outside himself?

I cannot believe that there’s anything in my individual consciousness which my experience or that of my ancestors has not placed there—­in raw material at least; or that in working up that raw material I can exert any genius in my sometimes chaotic dreams that I cannot exert in my systematized waking hours.  All the people I meet and talk with in my dreams may have been met and talked with by me or my forebears, though I don’t believe it; but the works of art I see have not been known to me or my ancestors or any other mortal; nor have I any sign of the genius to combine whatever elements of them I may have seen, into any such designs.  And when in dreams other persons tell me things contrary to my firmest convictions, in which things I later discover germs of most important workable truth, the persons who tell me that, and who are different from me as far as fairly decent persons can differ from each other, are certainly not, as the good Du Prel would have us believe, myself.  All these things are not figments of my mind—­if they are figments of a mind, it’s a mind bigger than mine.  The biggest claim I can make, or assent to anybody else making, is that my mind is telepathically receptive of the product of that greater mind.