Note note 65 — ANALYSIS OF THE PHENOMENA OF THE HUMAN MIND James Mill

65 The author makes frequent reference to dreams, but it may be doubted whether he has seized the explanation of that obscure phenomenon. It is an approximately correct statement of one circumstance of dreams, that the Ideas are unmixed with sensations; in a sound slumber, we are inaccessible to the sensations of the five senses. We are not equally fortified against the organic sensations, as those of digestion and other functions. The sensations absent are a very important class, as regards objective or outward reality; and it is probably their absence, as competitors on this ground, that allows the ideas to swell out into an unnatural and illusory prominence, as if they alone were the full reality. This is a more probable account of the illusion, than the circumstance given in the text, “the greater vividness” of the monopolising Ideas, although that too is a fact, and may tend in the same direction.—B.