In other dreams the communications made, though at first astounding, and all but supernatural, are easily referable to a principle which I noticed in the earlier part of this lecture, I mean the revival of impressions which had remained dormant and unremembered for an indefinite period, till some particular incident occurred capable of giving the magic touch of re-vivification, like the marvellous words, "Open, Sesame!" the only ones that would unlock the treasury of past perceptions. If a person may grow up to adult age, and never remember a scene which happened in earliest childhood, till the suggestive association has been afforded by the smell of a certain flower of rare occurrence, it is quite accountable that in the mental processes of sleep some phenomenon may occur that has this effect on what had previously been forgotten, and which may seem to be a new representation. One of the most striking instances of a person's remembering in a dream what he had forgotten in his waking state, may be found in the case of Mr. R, narrated by Sir Walter Scott, in his Notes to "The

* Dr. Abercrombie.

Some dreams work their own fulfilment. The mind vehemently possessed by an idea thus received, almost instinctively acts up to it. An unhappy person having dreamed that he should commit murder, was continually haunted by the impression, so that at last he fell upon the crime as if devoted to it by an irresistible destiny. The influence of an idea of the same kind, but obtained from another source, is but too often exemplified. The details of atrocities in our public prints so fasten on the minds of persons of a certain temperament, as to lead, on the principle of passive imitation, to the perpetration of like horrible deeds. Suicide has often been so induced. A belief in the premonitions of dreams would greatly add to the effect. The subject of it might fancy himself, Oresteslike, doomed to be, in the hands of Fate, the instrument of punishment to the appointed victim, and yet be himself the more pitiable of the two. But the dream may sometimes act by supplying an additional motive to those already in operation, strengthening the sense of duty, or some passionate enthusiasm. Thought of at first as a bare possibility, amusing the mind that contemplates it, it becomes familiar.

Circumstances happen that bring it nearer to a probability, and at last the dreamer's own will converts it into a certainty.

Oliver Cromwell is said to have had a remarkable dream when a boy. " He had laid himself down one day," it is said, "too fatigued with his youthful sports to hope for sleep, when suddenly the curtains of his bed were slowly withdrawn by a gigantic figure, which bore the aspect of a woman, and which, gazing at him silently for awhile, told him that he should, before his death, be the greatest man in England. He remembered, when he told the story, that the figure had not made mention of the word King." *

Forty years of the life of this wonderful man passed without any occurrence that we can imagine likely to have reminded him of this incident as anything but a dream. Bye and bye, in his fierce struggles with the regal power, the phantom might have passed before his mind, and still, perhaps, only raised a smile on the patriot's stern countenance. At Naseby the phantom might have worn a more solemn aspect, - and at Worcester it might have grown into a spirit, and the voice into an oracle. Perhaps, on the floor of the House of

Commons, when, by the breath of his mouth, he drove the

Long Parliament from the very scene of his anti-monarchical exertions, his soul at last became fully obedient to the spell of the idea, which had now reached its full development.

* Forster's Cromwell, in the Lives of British Statesmen.

His strong will, then become dominant over every other, may have become the servant of his thought. He had realized his dream. Cromwell, though not a king, had made himself, in very deed, the greatest man in England. In other cases the dream is fulfilled on a different principle. We have seen that the operations of the mind may, in sleep, closely resemble those of our waking hours, especially when the sleeper retires with his mind full of a particular subject. The thoughts of the day are not only repeated in this morbid sleep, but even extended, so that new and important results may be obtained. But the suggestions of the mind so formed may, because they have occurred in a dream, be erroneously taken for supernatural communications. The following case, related by Dr. Abbb-crombie, well illustrates what I have said. " A most respectable clergyman, in a country parish of Scotland, made a collection at his church for an object of public benevolence, in which he felt deeply interested. The amount of the collection, which was received in ladles carried through the church, fell greatly short of his expectation; and during the evening of the day he frequently alluded to this with expressions of much disappointment. In the following night he dreamt that three one-pound notes had been left in one of the ladles, having been so compressed by the money which had been thrown in above them, that they had stuck in the corner when the ladle was emptied. He was so impressed by the vision, that at an early hour in the morning he went to the church, found the ladle which he had seen in his dream, and drew from one of the corners of it three one-pound notes."

But it is very needful to be cautious as to such presumptions from apparent final causes. For proof of which we may turn to the autobiography of Capt. John Crichton, a gentleman who served in Scotland during the unhappy reigns of Charles II. and James II. This worthy person relates, on two separate occasions, dreams which gave him the due to the hiding-place of some of the unhappy Covenanters, who in those days were undergoing a most brutal persecution, when the principles of toleration and christian charity were but little acted upon by either of the conflicting parties in the ascendancy. By the information received in his dreams, Capt. Crichton was enabled, on both occasions, to pounce upon his victims. "Having drank hard one night," he says, "I dreamed that I had found Capt. David Steele, a notorious rebel, in one of the five formers' houses, in the shire of Clydesdale, and parish of Lismahego, within eight miles of Hamilton, a place that I was well acquainted with;" and then he tells how by means of this information he caused the man's death.