"Dreams that wave before the half-shut eye,"
just closing for an afternoon nap. Then I invite to my vision a wide
landscape, with a cold, wintry afternoon light upon it, and over this
plain I have bands and groups of people scurrying, in mediæval hose of
divers colors and mediæval leathern jerkins, hugging themselves against
the frost, and very miserable. They affect me with a profound
compassion; they represent to me, somehow, the vast mass of humanity,
the mass that does the work, and earns the bread, and goes cold and
hungry through all the ages. I should be at a loss to say why this was
the effect, and I am utterly unable to say why these fore-dreams, which
I partially solicit, should have such a tremendous significance as they
seem to have. They are mostly of the most evanescent and intangible
character, but they have one trait in common. They always involve the
attribution of ethical motive and quality to material things, and in
their passage through my brain they promise me a solution of the riddle
of the painful earth in the very instant when they are gone forever.
They are of innumerable multitude, chasing each other with the swiftness
of light, and never staying to be seized by the memory, which seems
already drugged with sleep before their course begins. One of these
dreams, indeed, I did capture, and I found it to be the figure 8, but
lying on its side, and in that posture involving the mystery and the
revelation of the mystery of the universe. I leave the reader to imagine
why.
As we grow older, I think we are less and less able to remember our
dreams. This is perhaps because the experience of youth is less dense,
and the empty spaces of the young consciousness are more hospitable to
these airy visitants. A few dreams of my later life stand out in strong
relief, but for the most part they blend in an indistinguishable mass,
and pass away with the actualities into a common oblivion. I should say
that they were more frequent with me than they used to be; it seems to
me that now I dream whole nights through, and much more about the
business of my waking life than formerly. As I earn my living by weaving
a certain sort of dreams into literary form, it might be supposed that I
would some time dream of the personages in these dreams, but I cannot
remember that I have ever done so. The two kinds of inventing, the
voluntary and the involuntary, seem absolutely and finally distinct.
Of the prophetic dreams which people sometimes have I have mentioned the
only one of mine which had any dramatic interest, but I have verified in
my own experience the theory of Ribot that approaching disease sometimes
intimates itself in dreams of the disorder impending, before it is
otherwise declared in the organism. In actual sickness I think that I
dream rather less than in health. I had a malarial fever when I was a
boy, and I had a sort of continuous dream in it that distressed me
greatly. It was of gliding down the school-house stairs without touching
my feet to the steps, and this was indescribably appalling.
The anguish of mind that one suffers from the imaginary dangers of
dreams is probably of the same quality as that inspired by real peril in
waking. A curious proof of this happened within my knowledge not many
years ago. One of the neighbor's children was coasting down a long hill
with a railroad at the foot of it, and as he neared the bottom an
express-train rushed round the curve. The flag-man ran forward and
shouted to the boy to throw himself off his sled, but he kept on and ran
into the locomotive, and was so hurt that he died. His injuries,
however, were to the spine, and they were of a kind that rendered him
insensible to pain while he lived. He talked very clearly and calmly of
his accident, and when he was asked why he did not throw himself off
his sled, as the flag-man bade him, he said: "_I thought it was a
dream._" The reality had, through the mental stress, no doubt transmuted
itself to the very substance of dreams, and he had felt the same kind
and quality of suffering as he would have done if he had been dreaming.
The Norwegian poet and novelist Björnstjerne Björnson was at my house
shortly after this happened, and he was greatly struck by the
psychological implications of the incident; it seemed to mean for him
all sorts of possibilities in the obscure realm where it cast a fitful
light.
But such a glimmer soon fades, and the darkness thickens round us again.
It is not with the blindfold sense of sleep that we shall ever find out
the secret of life, I fancy, either in the dreams which seem personal to
us each one, or those universal dreams which we apparently share with
the whole race. Of the race-dream, as I may call it, there is one hardly
less common than that dream of going about insufficiently clad, which I
have already mentioned, and that is the dream of suddenly falling from
some height and waking with a start. The experience before the start is
extremely dim, and latterly I have condensed this dread almost as much
as the preliminary passages of my burglar-dream. I am aware of nothing
but an instant of danger, and then comes the jar or jolt that wakens me.
Upon the whole, I find this a great saving of emotion, and I do not know
but there is a tendency, as I grow older, to shorten up the detail of
what may be styled the conventional dream, the dream which we have so
often that it is like a story read before. Indeed, the plots of dreams
are not much more varied than the plots of romantic novels, which are
notoriously stale and hackneyed. It would be interesting, and possibly
important, if some observer would note the recurrence of this sort of
dreams and classify their varieties. I think we should all be
astonished to find how few and slight the variations were.