Reincarnation | Page 6

other hand, the
cerebral ideation of the waking state is fatiguing if intense or prolonged,

or if the nervous system of the thinker is deprived of its normal power
of resistance (in neurasthenia); the commonplace (brain) dream is also
fatiguing if prolonged or at all vivid.
Another peculiarity is that a dream--the real dream--which would
require several years of life on earth for its realisation, can take place in
a second. The dream of Maury (Le Sommeil et le Rève, p. 161), who in
half a second lived through three years of the French Revolution, and
many other dreams of the same nature, are instances of this. Now,
Fechner has proved, in his Elemente der Psychophysik, first, that a
fraction of a second is needed for the sensorial contact to cause the
brain to vibrate--this prevents our perceiving the growth of a plant and
enables us to see a circle of fire when a piece of glowing coal is rapidly
whirled round; secondly, that another fraction of a second is needed for
the cerebral vibration to be transformed into sensation. We might add
that a third fraction of a second is needed for sensation to be
transformed into ideation, proving that in these special dreams there
can have been no more than an instantaneous, mass impression of all
the elements of the dream upon the brain,[7] and that the dream itself
has been produced by the imaginative action of the soul in the astral
body, an extremely subtle one, whose vibratory power is such as to
transform altogether our ordinary notions of time and space.
The death-bed dream. In dying people, the bodily senses gradually lose
their vitality, and by degrees the soul concentrates itself within the finer
vehicle. From that time signs of the higher consciousness appear, time
is inordinately prolonged, visions present themselves, the prophetic
faculty is sometimes manifested, and verified cases are related of
removal to a distance, like that of the Alsatian woman dying on board
ship. During the final coma she went to Rio de Janeiro and commended
her child to the keeping of a fellow-countryman. (D'Assier's L'humanité
posthume, p. 47) Similar instances are found in The Night Side of
Nature, by C. Crowe, as well as in other works of the same kind.
The dream of intoxication. Under the influence of soporifics the same
transfer of consciousness is produced, and we meet with more or less
remarkable phenomena due to the higher consciousness. Opium

smokers and eaters of hashish are able to form ideas with such rapidity
that minutes seem to them to be years, and a few moments in
dreamland delude them into the idea that they have lived through a
whole life. (Hervey's Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger.)
The dream of asphyxia. During asphyxia by submersion the higher
consciousness enters into a minute study of the life now running to its
close. In a few moments it sees the whole of it again in its smallest
details. Carl du Prel (Philos. der Mystik) gives several instances of this;
Haddock (Somnolism and Psychism, p. 213) quotes, among other cases,
that of Admiral Beaufort. During two minutes' loss of consciousness in
a drowning condition, he saw again every detail of his life, all his
actions, including their causes, collateral circumstances, their effects,
and the reflections of the victim on the good and evil that had resulted
therefrom.
Perty's account (Die Mystischen Erscheinungen der Menschlichen
Natur) of Catherine Emmerich, the somnambulist nun, who, when
dying, saw again the whole of her past life, would incline one to think
that this strange phenomenon, which traditional Catholicism appears to
have called the "Private Judgment," and which theosophy defines with
greater preciseness, is not limited to asphyxia by submersion, but is the
regular accompaniment of life's ending.
MANIFESTATION OF THE HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS IN
VARIOUS CASES OF MENTAL FACULTIES LOST TO NORMAL
CONSCIOUSNESS.
A rather large number of people born blind have images in dreams, and
can see with the higher consciousness, when placed in a state of
somnambulism. This proves that the higher consciousness possesses
the power of vision on its own plane, and can impress images thereof
on the brain.
That this impression may be translated into the language of the physical
plane,[8] it must evidently take place in one of the physical centres of
vision which make possible three-dimensional sight; these centres may
be intact even when the external visual apparatus does not exist or is

incapable of functioning.
A deaf and dumb idiot became intelligent and spoke during
spontaneous somnambulism (Steinbach's Der Dichter ein Seher). This
is a case which appears to us difficult to explain fully; indeed, if the
impression of the higher vibration on that portion of the brain which
presides over intelligence and thought can be understood, it is not easy
to