But I do not so much object to these ordeals as to some social
experiences which I have in dreams. I cannot understand why one should
dream of being slighted or snubbed in society, but this is what I have
done more than once, though never perhaps so signally as in the instance
I am about to give. I found myself in a large room, where people were
sitting at lunch or supper around small tables, as is the custom, I am
told, at parties in the houses of our nobility and gentry. I was feeling
very well; not too proud, I hope, but in harmony with the time and
place. I was very well dressed, for me; and as I stood talking to some
ladies at one of the tables I was saying some rather brilliant things,
for me; I lounged easily on one foot, as I have observed men of fashion
do, and as I talked, I flipped my gloves, which I held in one hand,
across the other; I remember thinking that this was a peculiarly
distinguished action. Upon the whole I comported myself like one in the
habit of such affairs, and I turned to walk away to another table, very
well satisfied with myself and with the effect of my splendor upon the
ladies. But I had got only a few paces off when I perceived (I could not
see with my back turned) one of the ladies lean forward, and heard her
say to the rest in a tone of killing condescension and patronage: "_I_
don't see why that person isn't as well as another."
I say that I do not like this sort of dreams, and I never would have
them if I could help. They make me ask myself if I am really such a snob
when I am waking, and this in itself is very unpleasant. If I am, I
cannot help hoping that it will not be found out; and in my dreams I am
always less sorry for the misdeeds I commit than for their possible
discovery. I have done some very bad things in dreams which I have no
concern for whatever, except as they seem to threaten me with publicity
or bring me within the penalty of the law; and I believe this is the
attitude of most other criminals, remorse being a fiction of the poets,
according to the students of the criminal class. It is not agreeable to
bring this home to one's self, but the fact is not without its
significance in another direction. It implies that both in the case of
the dream-criminal and the deed-criminal there is perhaps the same taint
of insanity; only in the deed-criminal it is active, and in the
dream-criminal it is passive. In both, the inhibitory clause that
forbids evil is off, but the dreamer is not bidden to do evil as the
maniac is, or as the malefactor often seems to be. The dreamer is purely
unmoral; good and bad are the same to his conscience; he has no more to
do with right and wrong than the animals; he is reduced to the state of
the merely natural man; and perhaps the primitive men were really like
what we all are now in our dreams. Perhaps all life to them was merely
dreaming, and they never had anything like our waking consciousness,
which seems to be the offspring of conscience, or else the parent of it.
Until men passed the first stage of being, perhaps that which we call
the soul, for want of a better name, or a worse, could hardly have
existed, and perhaps in dreams the soul is mostly absent now. The soul,
or the principle that we call the soul, is the supernal criticism of the
deeds done in the body, which goes perpetually on in the waking mind.
While this watches, and warns or commands, we go right; but when it is
off duty we go neither right nor wrong, but are as the beasts that
perish.
A common theory is that the dreams which we remember are those we have
in the drowse which precedes sleeping and waking; but I do not
altogether accept this theory. In fact, there is very little proof of
it. We often wake from a dream, literally, but there is no proof that we
did not dream in the middle of the night the dream which is quite as
vividly with us in the morning as the one we wake from. I should think
that the dream which has some color of conscience in it was the
drowse-dream, and that the dream which has none is the sleep-dream; and
I believe that the most of our dreams will be found by this test to be
sleep-dreams. It is in these we may know what we would be without our
souls, without their supernal criticism of the mind; for the mind keeps
on working in them, with the lights of waking knowledge, both experience
and observation, but ruthlessly, remorselessly. By them we may know what
the state of the habitual criminal is, what the state of the lunatic,
the animal, the devil is. In them the personal character ceases; the
dreamer is remanded to his type.