IV

There are things in dreams very awful, which would not be at all so in

waking--quite witless and aimless things, which at the time were of such

baleful effect that it remains forever. I remember dreaming when I was

quite a small boy, not more than ten years old, a dream which is vivider

in my mind now than anything that happened at the time. I suppose it

came remotely from my reading of certain "Tales of the Grotesque and the

Arabesque," which had just then fallen into my hands; and it involved

simply an action of the fire-company in the little town where I lived.

They were working the brakes of the old fire-engine, which would seldom

respond to their efforts, and as their hands rose and fell they set up

the heart-shaking and soul-desolating cry of "Arms Poe! arms Poe! arms

Poe!" This and nothing more was the body of my horror; and if the reader

is not moved by it the fault is his and not mine; for I can assure him

that nothing in my experience had been more dreadful to me.

I can hardly except the dismaying apparition of a clown whom I once saw,

somewhat later in life, rise through the air in a sitting posture and

float lightly over the house-roof, snapping his fingers and vaguely

smiling, while the antennæ on his forehead, which clowns have in common

with some other insects, nodded elasticity. I do not know why this

portent should have been so terrifying, or indeed that it was a portent

at all, for nothing ever came of it; what I know is that it was to the

last degree threatening and awful. I never got anything but joy out of

the circuses where this dream must have originated, but the pantomime of

"Don Giovanni," which I saw at the theater, was as grewsome to me

waking as it was to me dreaming. The statue of the Commendatore, in

getting down from his horse to pursue the wicked hero (I think that is

what he gets down for), set an example by which a long line of statues

afterward profited in my dreams. For many years, and I do not know but

quite up to the time when I adopted burglars as the theme of my

nightmares, I was almost always chased by a marble statue with an

uplifted arm, and almost always I ran along the verge of a pond to

escape it. I believe that I got this pond out of my remote childhood,

and that it may have been a fish-pond embowered by weeping-willows which

I used to admire in the door-yard of a neighbor. I have somehow a

greater respect for the material of this earlier nightmare than I have

for that of the later ones, and no doubt the reader will agree with me

that it is much more romantic to be pursued by a statue than to be

threatened by burglars. It is but a few hours ago, however, that I saved

myself from these inveterate enemies by waking up just in time for

breakfast. They did not come with that light of the dark-lanterns

shining under the door, or I should have known them at once, and not had

so much bother; but they intimated their presence in the catch of the

lock, which would not close securely, and there was some question at

first whether they were not ghosts. I thought of tying the doorknob on

the inside of my room to my bedpost (a bedpost that has not been in

existence for fifty years), but after suffering awhile I decided to

speak to them from an upper window. By this time they had turned into a

trio of harmless, necessary tramps, and at my appeal to them absolutely

nonsensical as I now believe it to have been, to regard the peculiar

circumstances, whatever they were or were not, they did really get up

from the back porch where they were seated and go quietly away.

Burglars are not always so easily to be entreated. On one occasion, when

I found a party of them digging at the corner of my house on Concord

Avenue in Cambridge, and opened the window over them to expostulate, the

leader looked up at me in well-affected surprise. He lifted his hand,

with a twenty-dollar note in it, toward me, and said: "Oh! Can you

change me a twenty-dollar bill?" I expressed a polite regret that I had

not so much money about me, and then he said to the rest, "Go ahead,

boys," and they went on undermining my house. I do not know what came of

it all.

Of ghosts I have seldom dreamed, so far as I can remember; in fact, I

have never dreamed of the kind of ghosts that we are all more or less

afraid of, though I have dreamed rather often of the spirits of departed

friends. But I once dreamed of dying, and the reader, who has never died

yet, may be interested to know what it is like. According to this

experience of mine, which I do not claim is typical, it is like a fire

kindling in an air-tight stove with paper and shavings; the gathering

smoke and gases suddenly burst into flame and puff the door out, and all

is over.

I have not yet been led to execution for the many crimes I have

committed in my dreams, but I was once in the hands of a barber who

added to the shaving and shampooing business the art of removing his

customers' heads in treatment for headache. As I took my seat in his

chair I had some lingering doubts as to the effect of a treatment so

drastic, and I ventured to mention the case of a friend of mine, a

gentleman somewhat eminent in the law, who after several weeks was still

going about without his head. The barber did not attempt to refute my

position. He merely said: "Oh, well, he had such a very thick sort of a

head, anyway."

This was a sarcasm, but I think it was urged as a reason, though it may

not have been. We rarely bring away from sleep the things that seem so

brilliant to us in our dreams. Verse is especially apt to fade away, or

turn into doggerel in the memory, and the witty sayings which we

contrive to remember will hardly bear the test of daylight. The most

perfect thing of the kind out of my own dreams was something that I

seemed to wake with the very sound of in my ears. It was after a certain

dinner, which had been rather uncommonly gay, with a good deal of very

good talk, which seemed to go on all night, and when I woke in the

morning someone was saying: "Oh, I shouldn't at all mind his robbing

Peter to pay Paul, if I felt sure that Paul would get the money." This I

think really humorous, and an extremely neat bit of characterization; I

feel free to praise it, because it was not I who said it.

V

Apparently the greater part of dreams have no more mirth than sense in

them. This is perhaps because the man is in dreams reduced to the brute

condition, and is the lawless inferior of the waking man intellectually,

as the lawless in waking are always the inferiors of the lawful. Some

loose thinkers suppose that if we give the rein to imagination it will

do great things, but it will really do little things, foolish and

worthless things, as we witness in dreams, where it is quite unbridled.

It must keep close to truth, and it must be under the law if it would

work strongly and sanely. The man in his dreams is really lower than the

lunatic in his deliriums. These have a logic of their own; but the

dreamer has not even a crazy logic.

"Like a dog, he hunts in dreams,"

and probably his dreams and the dog's are not only alike, but are of the

same quality. In his wicked dreams the man is not only animal, he is

devil, so wholly is he let into his evils, as the Swedenborgians say.

The wrong is indifferent to him until the fear of detection and

punishment steals in upon him. Even then he is not sorry for his

misdeed, as I have said before; he is only anxious to escape its

consequences.

It seems probable that when this fear makes itself felt he is near to

waking; and probably when we dream, as we often do, that the thing is

only a dream, and hope for rescue from it by waking, we are always just

about to wake. This double effect is very strange, but still more

strange is the effect which we are privy to in the minds of others when

they not merely say things to us which are wholly unexpected, but think

things that we know they are thinking, and that they do not express in

words. A great many years ago, when I was young, I dreamed that my

father, who was in another town, came into the room where I was really

lying asleep and stood by my bed. He wished to greet me, after our

separation, but he reasoned that if he did so I should wake, and he

turned and left the room without touching me. This process in his mind,

which I knew as clearly and accurately as if it had apparently gone on

in my own, was apparently confined to his mind as absolutely as anything

could be that was not spoken or in any wise uttered.

Of course, it was of my agency, like any other part of the dream, and it

was something like the operation of the novelist's intention through the

mind of his characters. But in this there is the author's consciousness

that he is doing it all himself, while in my dream this reasoning in the

mind of another was something that I felt myself mere witness of. In

fact, there is no analogy, so far as I can make out, between the process

of literary invention and the process of dreaming. In the invention, the

critical faculty is vividly and constantly alert; in dreaming, it seems

altogether absent. It seems absent, too, in what we call day-dreaming,

or that sort of dramatizing action which perhaps goes on perpetually in

the mind, or some minds. But this day-dreaming is not otherwise any more

like night-dreaming than invention is; for the man is never more

actively and consciously a man, and never has a greater will to be fine

and high and grand than in his day-dreams, while in his night-dreams he

is quite willing to be a miscreant of any worst sort.

It is very remarkable, in view of this fact, that we have now and then,

though ever so much more rarely, dreams that are as angelic as those

others are demoniac. Is it possible that then the dreamer is let into

his goods (the word is Swedenborg's again) instead of his evils? It may

be supposed that in sleep the dreamer lies passive, while his proper

soul is away, and other spirits, celestial and infernal, have free

access to his mind, and abuse it to their own ends in the one case, and

use it in his behalf in the other.

That would be an explanation, but nothing seems quite to hold in regard

to dreams. If it is true, why should the dreamer's state so much oftener

be imbued with evil than with good? It might be answered that the evil

forces are much more positive and aggressive than the good; or that the

love of the dreamer, which is his life, being mainly evil, invites the

wicked spirits oftener. But that is a point which I would rather leave

each dreamer to settle for himself. The greater number of everyone's

dreams, like the romantic novel, I fancy, concern incident rather than

character, and I am not sure, after all, that the dream which convicts

the dreamer of an essential baseness is commoner than the dream that

tells in his favor morally.

I daresay every reader of this book has had dreams so amusing that he

has wakened himself from them by laughing, and then not found them so

very funny, or perhaps not been able to recall them at all. I have had

at least one of this sort, remarkable for other reasons, which remains

perfect in my mind, though it is now some ten years old. One of the

children had been exposed to a very remote chance of scarlet-fever at

the house of a friend, and had been duly scolded for the risk, which was

then quite forgotten. I dreamed that this friend, however, was giving a

ladies' lunch, at which I was unaccountably and invisibly present, and

the talk began to run upon the scarlet-fever cases in her family. She

said that after the last she had fumigated the whole house for

seventy-two hours (the period seemed very significant and important in

my dream), and had burned everything she could lay her hands on.

"And what did the nurse burn?" asked one of the other ladies.