On Dreams (William Hazlitt)
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"On Dreams" is an essay by William Hazlitt published in The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things.
Excerpt:
- "There is a sort of profundity in sleep; it may be usefully consulted as an oracle in this way. It may be said that the voluntary power is suspended, and things come upon us as unexpected revelations, which we keep out of our thoughts at other times. We may be aware of a danger that we do not choose, while we have the full command of our faculties, to acknowledge to ourselves; the impending event will then appear to us as a dream and we shall most likely find it verified afterwards. Another thing of no small consequence is, that we may sometimes discover our tacit and almost unconscious sentiments, with respect to persons or things in the same way. We are not hypocrites in our sleep. The curb is taken off from our passions and our imagination wanders at will. When awake, we check these rising thoughts, and fancy we have them not. In dreams when we are off our guard, they return securely and unbidden. We make this use of the infirmity of our sleeping metamorphoses, that we may repress any feelings of this sort that we disapprove in their incipient state, and detect, ere it be too late, an unwarrantable antipathy or fatal passions. Infants cannot disguise their thoughts from others; and in sleep we reveal the secret to ourselves."
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