ing is uncontrolled and
undirected by the will. The will--the inhibiting and guiding
power--finds rest and refreshment in sleep, while the mind, like a
barque without rudder or compass, drifts aimlessly upon an uncharted
sea. But curiously enough, these fantasies and inter-twistings of
thought are to be found in great imaginative poems like Spenser's "Faerie
Queene." Lamb was impressed by the analogy between our dream-thinking
and the work of the imagination. Speaking of the episode in the cave of
Mammon, Lamb wrote:

"It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a copy of the mind's
conceptions in sleep; it is--in some sort, but what a copy! Let the most
romantic of us that has been entertained all night with the spectacle of
some wild and magnificent vision, re-combine it in the morning and try
it by his waking judgment. That which appeared so shifting and yet so
coherent, when it came under cool examination, shall appear so
reasonless and so unlinked, that we are ashamed to have been so deluded,
and to have taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god. The
transitions in this episode are every whit as violent as in the most
extravagant dream, and yet the waking judgment ratifies them."

Perhaps I feel more than others the analogy between the world of our
waking life and the world of dreams because before I was taught, I lived
in a sort of perpetual dream. The testimony of parents and friends who
watched me day after day is the only means that I have of knowing the
actuality of those early, obscure years of my childhood. The physical
acts of going to bed and waking in the morning alone mark the transition
from reality to Dreamland. As near as I can tell, asleep or awake I only
felt with my body. I can recollect no process which I should now dignify
with the term of thought. It is true that my bodily sensations were
extremely acute; but beyond a crude connection with physical wants they
are not associated or directed. They had little relation to each other,
to me or the experience of others. Idea--that which gives identity and
continuity to experience--came into my sleeping and waking existence at
the same moment with the awakening of self-consciousness. Before that
moment my mind was in a state of anarchy in which meaningless sensations
rioted, and if thought existed, it was so vague and inconsequent, it
cannot be made a part of discourse. Yet before my education began, I
dreamed. I know that I must have drea