But in thinking over
this I remind myself that on many occasions I have in sleep
been deceived by similar illusions, and in dwelling carefully
on this reflection I see so manifestly that there are no
certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish
wakefulness from sleep that I am lost in astonishment. And my
astonishment is such that it is almost capable of persuading
me that I now dream.
Now let us assume that we are asleep and that all these
particulars, e.g. that we open our eyes, shake our head,
extend our hands, and so on, are but false delusions; and let
us reflect that possibly neither our hands nor our whole body
are such as they appear to us to be. At the same time we must
at least confess that the things which are represented to us
in sleep are like painted representations which can only have
been formed as the counterparts of something real and true,
and that in this way those general things at least, i.e. eyes,
a head, hands, and a whole body, are not imaginary things, but
things really existent. For, as a matter of fact, painters,
even when they study with the greatest skill to represent
sirens and satyrs by forms the most strange and extraordinary,
cannot give them natures which are entirely new, but merely
make a certain medley of the members of different animals; or
if their imagination is extravagant enough to invent something
so novel that nothing similar has ever before been seen, and
that then their work represents a thing purely fictitious and
absolutely false, it is certain all the same that the colours
of which this is composed are necessarily real.
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