one 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