Night fruit

April 1.

The fruit a thinker bears is sentences, - statements or opinions. He seeks to affirm something as true.

I am surprised that my affirmations or utterances come to me ready-made, - not fore-thought, - so that I occasionally awake in the night simply to let fall ripe a statement which I had never consciously considered before, and as surprising and novel and agreeable to me as anything can be. As if we only thought by sympathy with the universal mind, which thought while we were asleep. There is such a necessity to make a definite statement that our minds at length do it without our consciousness.

This occurred to me last night, but I was so surprised by the fact which I have just endeavored to report that I have entirely forgotten what the particular observation was.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, April 1, 1860

... thought by sympathy with the universal mind ... while we were asleep. See March 17, 1852 ("I make the truest observations and distinctions then, when the will is yet wholly asleep and the mind works like a machine without friction. I am conscious of having, in my sleep, transcended the limits of the individual, and made observations and carried on conversations which in my waking hours I can neither recall nor appreciate. As if in sleep our individual fell into the infinite mind, ... On awakening we resume our enterprise, take up our bodies and become limited mind again."); February 19, 1854  ("The mind of the universe . . ., which we share . . .")