DREAMS.
.E VERY ONE remembers Addison's apologue of the
Eastern King, who went through the vicissitudes of many years in the interval of time that passed between his plunging his head into a bucket of water and his taking it out again. The King owed this experience to the mysterious art of the Dervish, who desired to give him a proof of the omni- potence of God. But what if a man could discover the secret for himself ? How indefinitely would he prolong his life, not indeed in time, but in the sensations and thoughts which are the essential parts of living, if he could bring at pleasure into a few seconds an episode which would seem to have a duration of years. Something of this kind is the leading idea of an ingenious romance which has lately appeared from the pen of a writer already known for his high imaginative power.* The hero of this story, eager for the pleasures which wealth can give, and weary of the tedious processes by which wealth is to be acquired, discovers, or imagines that he has discovered, the art of dreaming. It may be said, indeed, that every eater or smoker of opium has this art at his command, though it is certain that the gorgeously coloured experiences of De Quincey do not occur to every consumer of the drug, and probable that they were touched up by his waking imagination. But what the dreamer aimed at was control of the imaginings of sleep. To exercise a choice in the pictures which he was to see, the music he was to hear, the adventures which he should encounter, was the object of his study. And it was here, of course, that he broke down. He found that imagination, freed from the dominion of the waking will, is like a runaway horse, and that his discovery brought him far more pain than pleasure. Those who are discontented with the actual surroundings of their life, may find a safer, if not a more profitable, resource in what is called day-dreaming. Most of us, at least in our youth—for there is nothing which age takes from us more surely—have had some experience of this employment of the imagination. Children follow it, often in a most absorbing way. Many, perhaps most girls, who are not brought into too close a contact with actual necessities, have a sort of second life with their dolls. Some children have a curiously complete existence of this kind, with occupations, pleasures, friendships, even a language of its own. Now and then a person carries on the habit into maturer years. We have heard of a well-known historian of the last generation— we do not mention his name for fear of a mistake—who spent a considerable part of his life in the imagination that he was • A Dreamer of Dram:. By the Author of "Thoth." Edinburgh and London : William Blackwood and Bone. Emperor of Constantinople. He retired, so to speak, from the actualities of the nineteenth century into the Byzantine Court of the ninth, imagined himself the central figure of its gorgeous pageants, witnessed the faction-fights of the Blue and the Green in the hippodrome, and presided in the synod over the disputes of contending theologians. How far he was able to absorb himself in these imaginings, and shut out the sights and sounds of actual life, we do not know; but, as a rule, the day-dreamer is sadly liable to such in- terruptions. A suspicion of the real is always intruding itself into his world of fancy. He is like the lunatic in the workhouse asylum, who supposed himself to be sitting at the most splendid banquets and enjoying the most sumptuous fare, but complained that the turtle, the venison, and the champagne had always the taste of water-gruel. The day-dreamer never quite escapes from the water-gruel of life. It is only in the dreams of sleep—and not always in them— that we entirely lose ourselves. If we could control them, they might certainly be the most delightful, if not the most profit- able portion of our lives. As it is, most of us would gladly barter them for complete unconsciousness. We find that, as Hamlet puts it in dreaming is the "rub." Still, dreams, like other things over which we have no power, are an interesting subject. That the future may be learnt from them has, indeed, ceased to be an article of common belief. It would be rash to say that no intelligent person believes in the forewarnings or previsions thus given. Coincidences so extraordinary are on record that one is inclined to suspend judgment in the matter. But the art of interpreting dreams, which was once perhaps the favourite form of soothsaying, has be- come almost extinct. Fortune-tellers claim to foresee the future by astrology, by the combinations of cards, or by the lines of the hand ; but "The Book of Dreams" is seldom or never part of their stock-in-trade. Yet dreams sometimes indicate the future in a way that might, one is inclined to think, be made more use of than it commonly is. The phy- sician might sometimes include them with profit in his diagnosis. They often point to some local weakness or ail- ment, and point the more clearly because they commonly exaggerate sensations. Nothing, indeed, is more familiar than the connection between dreaming and physical disturbance. Experts will have it that whenever we sleep we dream ; and certainly our last and first waking experiences are of the dreamy kind. (Sufferers from insomnia know the delight with which they hail as a sure harbinger of sleep the disconnection of the thoughts.) But there is such a thing as dreamless sleep, in which these sports of the fancy, if not absent, are at least overpowered, and this is the sleep of the healthy. Dyspepsia is the common parent of dreams of the more noticeable kind ; and the present writer's experience, drawn from the painful sen- sations of many years, is that its offspring are of two clearly dis- tinguished kinds,—dreams of unusual coherence, when every- thing said or done is as logical and connected as though it belonged to waking life ; and dreams extravagantly absurd and horrible. To this latter class belongs the well-known variety of nightmare. The term is loosely applied to a variety of dreams which, though distressing enough in their way, lack the chief and most terrifying characteristic of this really awful inffic- tion. Each occupation of the more anxious kind has what is called its nightmare. The barrister fancies himself to have come into court without his briefs; the clergyman imagines that he is standing in the reading-desk and cannot find his place. But the true nightmare is one that combines the characteristics of what have been described above as the two classes of dyspeptic dreams, reality and unusual horror. The sufferer sees clearly about him what he recognises as his actual surroundings, the furniture of his room and the like, and into the midst of these actual circumstances there intrudes itself some frightful figure. It is the familiarity of the circum- stances that gives the apparition its terror. We often imagine ourselves in our sleep to be conversing with persons long since dead, and the imagination brings with it no dismay, scarcely even surprise, because all the circumstances are strange. It would be an awful experience were it to happen in the midst of familiar surroundings. The writer can never forget his first experience of the true nightmare. He saw the window of his room open —it was a ground-floor room in College—and a hideous figure (borrowed by his imagination, as he afterwards remembered, from a picture familiar to his childhood) enter, fly rapidly to the bed, and seat itself Iupon his chest. The terror of it was
that he saw the pattern of the paper on the wall, the wash- stand, the foot of the bed, as plainly as if he had been awake.
It is often asked,—Have our dreams any intellectual value P Of course the story of Coleridge's " ICubla Khan" will occur to every one. But one is tempted to ask,—Is it true P Cole- ridge sometimes said very strange things about his com- positions,—witness his curious story of having thrown his manuscripts overboard in a storm, manuscripts which, as one who knew him remarked, must have been those that he intended to write. Is it possible that it was an excuse for not finishing a poem for which he had lost the intellectual impulse P The common experience is that the brilliant imagina- tions of the night are somewhat like fairy-gold, which turns in the morning light to withered leaves ; or, to borrow a simile from reality, to the precious things which we pick up on the shore, which look so bright when they are wet, so dull when they are dry. Our English verses are found to halt lamentably, our Latin to be deplorably full of false quantities and false concords. Yet there are exceptions. The writer of "A. Dreamer of Dreams" tells us that every reading man works out difficult problems in his sleep. One of the leading- novelists of the day is said to dream his plots. The present writer not long ago had an experience of this kind, dreaming the outline of a story which seemed worth writing when judged by his waking judgment. But it is an experience which he does not wish to repeat. There are few but will be ready to. say, with a new intention in the words, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof!'
['V We made an error last week in miscalling Cowper's poem "The Castaway," "The Outcast." The former, of course, is in. every sense the more suitable as well as the actual title.]
Previous page
