There was another gentleman who for some time, after sleeping in the damp, suffered a sense of suffocation when slumbering in a recumbent position; and a dream would then come over him, as of a skeleton which grasped him firmly by the throat. This dream became at length so distressing, that sleep was to him no blessing, but a state of torture; and he had a centinel posted by his couch, with orders to awake his master when slumber seemed to be stealing o’er him. One night, ere he was awakened, he was attacked by the skeleton, and a long and severe conflict ensued. When fully awake, he remonstrated with the watcher for allowing him to remain _so long_ in his dream, and, to his astonishment, learned that his dream had been _momentary_, and that he was awoke _on the instant_ that he had begun to slumber.
But granting your notions of dreaming perfections, Astrophel, there are, to a certain extent, even here, _analogies_. You forget that in our waking moments our ideas are often so fleet as to be profitless to our judgment; and why not in a dream? In the estimation of distance, with what velocity the train of reasoning passes through the mind! Ere we have formed our notions of an object, how instantaneous our reflections on all its qualities—its brilliancy of colour, its apparent magnitude, its form, &c., and the angle of inclination in regard to the axis of the eye; and our conclusions (for judgment is awake) are echoes of the truth. But _in the dream_ is it so? No. We get the idea (as Mr. Locke has written) of time or duration by reflecting on that train of ideas which succeed each other in the mind. In waking hours the judgment clearly regulates this; but in dreams this course of reflection is _impeded_, and the measurement of time is imperfect and erroneous, so that it is the common characteristic of a dream, that there is _no idea of time_; the past and the future are equally present.
Start not, if to strengthen this my illustration, I lead you again into the mad-house; again unconsciously combine a dream with insanity, in quoting these expressions of the Rev. Robert Hall (from “Green’s Reminiscences”), in allusion to his first attack of mania. “All my imagination has been overstretched. You, with the rest of my friends, tell me that I was only seven _weeks_ in confinement, and the date of the year corresponds, so that I am bound to believe you, but they have appeared to me like seven _years_. My mind was so excited, and my imagination so lively and active, that more ideas passed through my mind during those seven weeks than in any seven years of my life. Whatever I had obtained from reading or reflection was _present to me_.”