DREAMS AND VISIONS.
[TO THE EDITOR OF TSB "SPECTATOR."]
Sia,—As the philosophy of Dreaming is being discussed in your journal, I offer two personal experiences as contributions to the material, judging, as I do, that their psychological peculiarities are such as to make it a duty to mention them, when silence would be more agreeable to myself.
1. First, then, while I have been what Turner once called a " paper-stainer "for thirty years, and that in very dissimilar forms of literature, I have never been able to write, nor even to think, the simplest story. The dullest novel of the season is as much beyond me as "John Inglesant " itself. But several years ago, I had a curious experience, new then, and never repeated since. Eleven times in one fortnight I dreamt a complete story, plot, dia- logue, descriptions, and all ; remembering enough of each story every morning to be certain that it was not a mere piecing- together of tales I had read, so as to be a cento, but that each was as original as such things are likely to be now-a-days. They struck me, looking at them critically, which I did, as being about on the same level, in length, style, diction, and so forth, as the short tales in Temple Bar, or Fraser. They were not better, and they were not worse. They faded out of my mind every morning before I finished dressing, and the experience has never returned. 2. The second case is, I think, more curious still. In 1865, I was on my way from Belgrade to Constantinople, and was waiting for a Danube boat to pass at midnight by some no-man's-land, where I was at the time, not far from Semlin,—a place wholly new to me. I fell in with two companions, a Montenegrin officer on a diplomatic errand somewhither for his Prince ; and another, whose nationality I forget. We agreed to dine together, which we did in a little summer-house in the inn garden ; and after dinner we got into conversation, .talking in a lingua franca, partly French, partly Italian, and partly anything which came handy. Suddenly there flashed across me the impression that I had been through it all before, in the same place, and with the same companions. Accordingly, I said to myself, "I will test it. If I have been here before, the next thing that man opposite will say, is so-and-so." And he said it immediately. I should add that it was, to the best of my recollection now, an entirely fresh subject which he started, and not anything arising out of the previous conversation, which might, of course, have been guessed by a quick-witted observer. Had I dreamt it all beforehand, and forgotten the dream F—I am, Sir, &c., [This flash of recollection is usually believed to arise from the two halves of the brain not keeping perfect step, but that will not explain Mr. Littledale's story.—En. Spectator.]
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