If I come to speak of dreams concerning the dead, it must be with a
tenderness and awe that all who have had them will share with me.
Nothing is more remarkable in them than the fact that the dead, though
they are dead, yet live, and are, to our commerce with them, quite like
all other living persons. We may recognize, and they may recognize, that
they are no longer in the body, but they are as verily living as we are.
This may be merely an effect from the doctrine of immortality which we
all hold or have held, and yet I would fain believe that it may be
something like proof of it. No one really knows, or can know, but one
may at least hope, without offending science, which indeed no longer
frowns so darkly upon faith. This persistence of life in those whom we
mourn as dead, may not it be a witness of the fact that the
consciousness cannot accept the notion of death at all, and,
"Whatever crazy sorrow saith,"
that we have never truly felt them lost? Sometimes those who have died
come back in dreams as parts of a common life which seems never to have
been broken; the old circle is restored without a flaw; but whether they
do this, or whether it is acknowledged between them and us that they
have died, and are now disembodied spirits, the effect of life is the
same. Perhaps in those dreams they and we are alike disembodied spirits,
and the soul of the dreamer, which so often seems to abandon the body to
the animal, is then the conscious entity, the thing which the dreamer
feels to be himself, and is mingling with the souls of the departed on
something like the terms which shall hereafter be constant.
I think very few of those who have lost their beloved have failed to
receive some sign or message from them in dreams, and often it is of
deep and abiding consolation. It may be that this is our anguish
compelling the echo of love out of the darkness where nothing is, but it
may be that there is something there which answers to our throe with
pity and with longing like our own. Again, no one knows, but in a matter
impossible of definite solution I will not refuse the comfort which
belief can give. Unbelief can be no gain, and belief no loss. But those
dreams are so dear, so sacred, so interwoven with the finest and
tenderest tissues of our being that one cannot speak of them freely, or
indeed more than most vaguely. It is enough to say that one has had
them, and to know that almost everyone else has had them, too. They seem
to be among the universal dreams, and a strange quality of them is that,
though they deal with a fact of universal doubt, they are, to my
experience at least, not nearly so fantastic or capricious as the dreams
that deal with the facts of every-day life and with the affairs of
people still in this world.
I do not know whether it is common to dream of faces or figures strange
to our waking knowledge, but occasionally I have done this. I suppose it
is much the same kind of invention that causes the person we dream of to
say or do a thing unexpected to us. But this is rather common, and the
creation of a novel aspect, the physiognomy of a stranger, in the person
we dream of, is rather rare. In all my dreams I can recall but one
presence of the kind. I have never dreamed of any sort of monster
foreign to my knowledge, or even of any grotesque thing made up of
elements familiar to it; the grotesqueness has always been in the motive
or circumstance of the dream. I have very seldom dreamed of animals,
though once, when I was a boy, for a time after I had passed a
corn-field where there were some bundles of snakes, writhen and knotted
together in the cold of an early spring day, I had dreams infested by
like images of those loathsome reptiles. I suppose that everyone has had
dreams of finding his way through unnamable filth and of feeding upon
hideous carnage; these are clearly the punishment of gluttony, and are
the fumes of a rebellious stomach.
I have heard people say they have sometimes dreamed of a thing, and
awakened from their dream and then fallen asleep and dreamed of the same
thing; but I believe that this is all one continuous dream; that they
did not really awaken, but only dreamed that they awakened. I have never
had any such dream, but at one time I had a recurrent dream, which was
so singular that I thought no one else had ever had a recurrent dream
till I proved that it was rather common by starting the inquiry in the
Contributors' Club in the _Atlantic Monthly_, when I found that great
numbers of people have recurrent dreams. My own recurrent dreams began
to come during the first year of my consulate at Venice, where I had
hoped to find the same kind of poetic dimness on the phases of American
life, which I wished to treat in literature, as the distance in time
would have given. I should not wish any such dimness now; but those were
my romantic days, and I was sorely baffled by its absence. The
disappointment began to haunt my nights as well as my days, and a dream
repeated itself from week to week for a matter of eight or ten months to
one effect. I dreamed that I had gone home to America, and that people
met me and said, "Why, you have given up your place!" and I always
answered: "Certainly not; I haven't done at all what I mean to do there,
yet. I am only here on my ten days' leave." I meant the ten days which
a consul might take each quarter without applying to the Department of
State; and then I would reflect how impossible it was that I should make
the visit in that time. I saw that I should be found out and dismissed
from my office and publicly disgraced. Then, suddenly, I was not consul
at Venice, and had not been, but consul at Delhi, in India; and the
distress I felt would all end in a splendid Oriental phantasmagory of
elephants and native princes, with their retinues in procession, which I
suppose was mostly out of my reading of De Quincey. This dream, with no
variation that I can recall, persisted till I broke it up by saying, in
the morning after it had recurred, that I had dreamed that dream again;
and so it began to fade away, coming less and less frequently, and at
last ceasing altogether.
I am rather proud of that dream; it is really my battle-horse among
dreams, and I think I will ride away on it.
[From _Impressions and Experiences_, by W. D. Howells. Copyright,
1896, by W. D. Howells.]