Page 188 - English Reader - 6

10 Reading Time 2

Read the essay below and do the activities.

DreAMs

Dreams are very different from waking
life, but it is extremely difficult to define

in what the difference exists. When we
are dreaming, we are nearly always

convinced that we are awake, and in
some cases real experiences have been

mistaken for dreams.

The latter mistake forms the subject of

a celebrated Spanish play called Life a
Dream, and of an amusing story in the
Arabian Nights, in which a poor man is

for a jest treated as a mighty monarch,

and it is contrived that he should
afterwards think that all the honourable
treatment he had actually received was

merely a vivid dream.

Sometimes even after waking, we may be doubtful whether our dream

was a reality or not, especially if we happen to fall asleep in our chair and
do not remember the circumstance of having fallen to sleep. Of course

this doubt can only arise when there has been nothing in our dream that
seems impossible to our wakened mind.

It is, however, only in rare cases that a dream exactly copies the experience

of our waking hours. As a rule, in our sleep all kinds of events seem to
happen which, in our waking hours we should know to be impossible. In

188 Dolphin English Reader Book 6