On Dreams   

something in consciousness which declares that what then presents

itself is but a dream. If, however, he is not aware of being asleep,

there is nothing which will contradict the testimony of the bare

presentation.

That what we here urge is true, i.e. that there are such

presentative movements in the sensory organs, any one may convince

himself, if he attends to and tries to remember the affections we

experience when sinking into slumber or when being awakened. He will

sometimes, in the moment of awakening, surprise the images which

present themselves to him in sleep, and find that they are really

but movements lurking in the organs of sense. And indeed some very

young persons, if it is dark, though looking with wide open eyes,

see multitudes of phantom figures moving before them, so that they

often cover up their heads in terror.

From all this, then, the conclusion to be drawn is, that the dream

is a sort of presentation, and, more particularly, one which occurs in

sleep; since the phantoms just mentioned are not dreams, nor is any

other a dream which presents itself when the sense-perceptions are

in a state of freedom. Nor is every presentation which occurs in sleep

necessarily a dream. For in the first place, some persons [when

asleep] actually, in a certain way, perceive sounds, light, savour,

and contact; feebly, however, and, as it were, remotely. For there

have been cases in which persons while asleep, but with the eyes

partly open, saw faintly in their sleep (as they supposed) the light

of a lamp, and afterwards, on being awakened, straightway recognized

it as the actual light of a real lamp; while, in other cases,

persons who faintly heard the crowing of cocks or the barking of

dogs identified these clearly with the real sounds as soon as they

awoke. Some persons, too, return answers to questions put to them in

sleep. For it is quite possible that, of waking or sleeping, while the

one is present in the ordinary sense, the other also should be present

in a certain way. But none of these occurrences should be called a