ON DREAMS.
TO those who have the power of dreaming, life is the richer for the gift. We do not speak of that type of dream where time is passed as it might be at a railway- station, where hurry and confusion and jostling find place; where people are two and the same person at once, and all is a crazy drama of involved absurdity. This dream has no
place here. It is of dreams of a far different nature that we would write,—such dreams as, crossing the hemp and home- spun woof of life, enrich it with rarer dyes; or confirm, to our spirits' solace, a belief in an unseen world.
There are those people whose dreams are the panorama of the landscape of their own lives. They have dreams that in a language of symbols, fantastic, poetic, or otherwise, are a running commentary on what they themselves are thinking • or enacting at the time. And to these dreamers there comes an ever-increasing power of comprehension. They are the interpreters of their own dreams. But these will tell you that their dreams are, as a rule, synchronous, and rarely prophetic. Such dreams may share the definition Hartley Coleridge gave of experience : "the light of a lantern set in the stern of a boat, illumining the path we leave behind us." There are the dreams of aerial movement, when we float, barely with the exertion of volition, light as thistledown before the wind ; dreams in which our happy bodies forget all care ; when we are propelled and sustained as by that breeze "that bears the blue butterfly more rapidly than its wings." And there are those dreams of reunion, when the Shining Ones of Beulah are in our sight; when with a joy that has but its semblance here, we spend long hours in some silent communion'; when we feel that all our thoughts, and hopes, and longings are at length made known, at last are understood and cherished ; when craft, and interference, and cruelty, and corruption are for ever entombed in the sea ; and time ceases because everything is believed, and forgiven, with shining eyes that tell it as we dream.
Life, we may see, metes out the same measure in different form. Joy, for instance, may be divided and handed round among many, as solidly as any plum-cake. Happy folk these, and the character of their countenance attests it. But those who meet joy otherwise, who find it, let us say, in dreams, ask those if they have wherewith to make complaint or lamen- tation. Rather shall you find there are some who have knowledge, yet no experience, of this inner life ; who, like 'Heathen& in " Wuthering Heidhts," are conscious of some spiritual alienation; who, while they notice the teasing of the fir-bough on the pane, hear no moorland voice beyond it ; and who would give the world to feel that little icy fist grip theirs in the falling snow.
Then there are the dreams of dream-scenery. Where else are the hills so full and rounded, the grass so deep and green ? Where else shall you find trees so lofty, such plenitude of leaves ?— " The nectarine and curious peach Themselves into my hand do reach: Stumbling on melons as I pass Ensnared in flowers, I fall on grass."
The sense of abundance in these lines brings, in some measure, dream-scenery before us. And having had one such dream, remembered vividly on waking, or unfolding with a growing rapture of conviction through the day ; having had one such dream, you may confront the petty ills of life unheeding. You may have to order the dinner, or be constrained to fasten your boots ; you may have to con- sult "Bradshaw," or even dwell with untoward friends ; but there all the while, as through some great open window, is
the dream-scenery beside you,—yours for the looking.
It is well if we discover early how impossible it is to tell our dreams.. We have dreamed perhaps some marvellous narrative, with incidentally colossal effects. The lights still cross and recross the arena of our mind; we still find the grandeur, the amazing subtilty, the precision of the whole. But how are we to put it into words ? It is to try to build a three-decker with some matches and a piece of string.
A child once dreamed that it was wandering in a great country. The sun was setting, and every blade of grass was yellow in the flooding light. Yet the child was unhappy because every one it had known was dead; and in its dream it knew it was the only creature living. At last, lying down at full length upon a grave, it cried so long and so utterly that it awoke. "What an abnormal child!" you may exclaim. "How unnatural!" Yet that child climbed trees, played cricket, and hated lessons as heartily as any other through the day. We are mistaken if we believe children have not this inner life. They have, but they rarely tell it.
The vividness of dream-scenery is matched, perhaps, by the poignancy of dream-tears, those dreams in which we hold no mastery Over our sorrow ; when we stand before an over- whelming sense of woe; when we seem to face something for the first time that we have nevertheless known since beyond the beginning of eternity. And it is in these dreams that we exert every fibre of our being to attain some object, to realise we have perhaps brushed an acorn from the path. In the Norse legend the god Thor must exert his utmost strength to drain a goblet ; and he finds he has lowered the wine a hair's-breadth in the bowl. Yet this goblet, if you remember, was a magic goblet, and communicated with the • depths of the sea. So we, in our dreams, often treat of slender issues : yet the foundations of the world seem involved.
Then there are the dreams of mystery. Our minds are oppressed with the weight of some responsibility it lies with us alone to sustain. We circumvent and negotiate indefi- nitely the power of some malignant and advancing force. These are the dreams in which the world is in collusion against us, when people whisper behind doors out of ear- shot, or blank their faces suddenly when we appear. They hurry by with a manner of grave import, the nature of which we may only nervously suspect. And we awake, teased with apprehension. And there are the dreams, on the other hand, of excelling ; dreams of our own paramount success ; when our words flow with the rivers, one with them in volume and resource ; from dark rock-set pools of indigna- tion to the far-reaching current of argument that brooks no let or hindrance in its course. How great we are in these dreams, how the world stands at gaze at us! So strong has been the truth—or the illusion—that it is strange to find it fade into the light of common day. There is almost a physical effort needed of readjustment, a putting ourselves once again into that landscape in which we are walking all the time. It is as if Perseus were asked to lay his winged sandals by, and take to the high road. Let us think, then, for a moment of that poetry we read or write in our dreams : the music we hear, the fields we see, the Laughter, the delight. Who shall take these from us,—this light that never was on sea or land ? Yet "joy and woe are woven fine, a clothing for the soul divine," and nowhere so closely as in our dreanis are these two blended. We know there are moments when it seems that we understand everything, when everything is made clear. But it is in our dreams.
"Shag any gazer see with mortal eyes
Or any searcher know by mortal mind ? Veil after veil may lift, but there shall be Veil after veil behind."
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