ABSTRACT
John Addington Symonds, a prominent Bristol physician, concluded the transcribed version of his lecture series on the same topic, Sleep and Dreams (1851), with the following salutary observation:
[Dreams]. … are not to be spoken of lightly, if we only consider how large a component part they form of man’s mental life. Think of all the children of men, from the birth of the human race; compute the amount of existence spent in dreaming life; allow only a fourth instead of a third for sleep, and out of this give only half to conscious dreaming; and even then how it dizzies the mind to comprise the largeness of the fact!1
