ppen 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.

* * * * *

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 hardly integral enough to be
a series, of disconnected pools, many of them perhaps more enchanting than
any parts of the waking stream, but not, like that stream, an organic
whole with motion toward definite results, and power to attain them. But
suppose the dream life continues after the body's death, and under
direction toward definite ends, at least so far as the waking life is, and
still free from the trammels of the waking life--suppose us to have at
least as much power to secure its joys and avoid its terrors as we have
regarding those of the waking life; and with all the old intimacies which
it spasmodically restores, restored permanently, and with the discipline
of separation to make them nearer perfect. What more can we manage to
want?

The suggestion has come to more than one student, that when we enter into
life--as spermatozoa, or star dust if you please--we enter into the
eternal life, but that the physical conditions essential to our
development into appreciating it, are a sort of veil between it and our
consciousnes