I have had a night of strange and terror-haunted dreams. Yesterday I
was forced to work at full speed, feverishly and furiously for a great
many hours, at a piece of work that admitted of no delay. By the
evening I was considerably exhausted, yet the work was not done. I
slept for an hour, and then settled down again and worked very late in
the night, until it was finished. Such a strain cannot be borne with
impunity, and I never do such a thing except under pressure of absolute
necessity. I suppose that I contrived to inflame some delicate tissue
of the brain, as the result was a series of intensely vivid dreams,
with a strange quality of horror about them. It was not so much that
the incidents themselves were of a dreadful type, but I was
overshadowed by a deep boding, a dull ache of the mind, which charged
everything that I saw with a sense of fortuitous dismay. I woke in that
painful mood in which the mind is filled with a formless dread; and the
sensation has hung about me, more or less, all day.
What a strange phenomenon it is that the sick mind should be able thus
to paint its diseased fancies in the dark, and then to be dismayed at
its own creations. In one of my dreams, for instance, I seemed to
wander in the bare and silent corridors of a great house. I passed a
small and sinister door, and was impelled to open it. I found myself in
a large oak-panelled room, with small barred windows admitting a sickly
light. The floor was paved with stone; and in the centre, built into
the pavement, stood a large block of basalt, black and smooth, which
was roughly carved into the semblance of a gigantic human head. I
stared at this for a long time, and then swiftly withdrew, overcome
with horror which I could not translate into words. All that I seemed
to know was that some kind of shocking rites were here celebrated: I
did not know what they were, and there were no signs of anything; no
instruments of death, no trace of slaughter; yet for all that I knew
that the place stood for some evil mystery, and the very walls and
floor seemed soaked with fear and pain.
That is the inexplicable part of dreams, that one should invent
incidents and scenes of every kind, with no sense of invention or
creation, with no feeling that one is able to control what one appears
to hear or see; and then that in some other part of one's mind, one
should be moved and stirred by the appropriate emotions awakened by
word or sight. In waking hours one can be stirred, amused, grieved by
the exercise of one's imagination, but one is aware that it is
imagination, and one does not lose the sense of responsibility, the
consciousness of creation.
It is this sensation, that dreams arise from some power or influence
exterior to oneself, which them the significance which they used to
possess, and indeed still possess, for the unreasoning mind. They seem
communications from some other sphere of life, experiences external to
oneself, messages from some hidden agency. When they correspond, as by
coincidence they are almost bound on occasions to do, with some
unforeseen and unexpected event that follows them, it is very difficult
for unphilosophical minds not to believe that they are visions sent
from some power that can foresee the future. It would be strange if
dreams, trafficking as they do with such wide and various experiences,
did not occasionally seem to be related to events of the following day,
however little anticipated those events may be; but no theory of dreams
would be satisfactory or scientific which did not take account of the
vast number of occasions on which they do not in the least correspond
with what followed in the day. The natural temper of man is so
pre-eminently unscientific that a single occasion on which a dream does
seem to correspond in a curious manner with subsequent events outweighs
a thousand occasions on which no such correspondence is traceable. Yet
nothing but a long series of premonitory dreams could suffice for the
basis of a scientific theory.
The main interest of dreams to myself is that they serve to show the
essential texture of the mind. In waking hours I am conscious of many
natural phenomena which make a strong impression on my mind; but my
dreaming mind makes, it seems, a whimsical selection among these
incidents, and discards some, while it makes a liberal use of others.
For instance, in real life, the sight of a beautiful sunset is a common
experience, and stirs in me the most profound emotion; yet I have never
seen a sunset in dreams. All my dreams are enacted in a pale and clear
light of which the source is never visible. I have never seen sun,
moon, or star in a dream. Again, to step into a farther region, I am a
good deal occupied in real life by ethical considerations; but in
dreams I have absolutely no sense of morality. I am afraid, in my
dreams, of the consequences of my acts; but I commit a murder or a
theft in a dream without the least scruple of conscience.
Whether this proves that my morality, my conscience, in real life, is a
purely conventional thing, acquired by habit, I do not know; it would
appear to be so. Again, some of my most habitual actions in real life
are never repeated in dreams; I have for many years devoted much time
and energy to literary work in real life, but in dreams I have never
written anything; though I have heard poems repeated or read from books
which are purely imaginary, and I have even read my own compositions
aloud from what appeared in dreams to be a previously written
manuscript; but I am never conscious, in dreams, of ever having put pen
to paper for any purpose whatever, even to write a letter. Yet, again,
it is not as though all the materials were drawn from a time before I
had begun to write; because sometimes dreams will repeat, or interweave
into their texture, quite recent experiences.
It appears to me as though the only part of the brain that is active in
dreams is the spectatorial and dramatic part; and even so it is quite
beyond me to solve the problem of how it comes about that my
visualising faculty in dreams can bring upon the stage, as it often
does, some personage who is perfectly well known to me in real life,
and cause him to behave in so unaccountable and grotesque a fashion
that I appear to be entirely bewildered and even shocked by the
occurrence. For instance, I dreamt the other night that I went to see a
high ecclesiastical dignitary, whom I have known for many years, whom I
knew in my dream to have been undergoing a rest-cure, though the person
in question has never to my knowledge undergone any such experience. I
was greatly surprised and even distressed when he entered the room
arrayed in a short jacket, with an Eton collar, carrying some childish
toys, and saying, "I am completely rejuvenated." I was not in the least
amused by this at the time, but only lost in wonder as to how I could
communicate to him that it would be a great misfortune if he went back
to his dignified post in such a guise and with such avocations as his
toys implied.
The whole thing is an insoluble mystery. I often wish that some
scientific person would investigate the matter in a strictly rational
spirit; though it is certainly difficult to see in what directions such
investigations could be fruitful. Still it seems to me strange and
unsatisfactory that so little should be known about the origin and
nature of so universal a phenomenon.
I have had sometimes dreams of a solemnity and beauty that appear to
transcend my powers of imagination. I have seen landscapes in dreams of
a kind that I have never seen in real life; I have held long, intimate,
and tender conversations with persons long since dead, which I might,
if I were inclined, consider to be real contact with disembodied
spirits, did I not also sometimes hold trivial, absurd, and even
painful intercourse, of an entirely uncharacteristic kind, with the
same people, intercourse which all sense of affection and reverence
would lead me unhesitatingly to regard as purely imaginary. The
strangest thing in such dreams is that the memory is wholly at fault,
because, though one is not conscious that the people have died long
ago, the mind is apt to wrestle with the wonder as to why one has seen
so little of them of recent years. The memory seems to be perfectly
aware that one has not seen much of them of late, but the effort to
recall the fact that they are dead, even when their deaths have been
some of the most vivid and grievous experiences of one's life, seems to
be quite beyond its power.
One of the most curious facts of all is this. I sometimes have had
extremely affectionate and confidential interviews with people in
dreams whom I have not known well--so vivid, indeed, that the dream
interview has proved a real step in a friendship, because when, as has
more than once occurred, I have met the same people in real life while
the dream is still fresh in my mind, I have met them with a sense of
confidential relations that has made it easier for me to advance in
intimacy and to take a certain sympathy for granted. I have one
particular friend in mind whose friendship I can honestly say I gained
in a dream.
On the other hand, I have occasionally had in a dream so painful and
unsatisfactory an interview with a friend, rousing in my mind such
anger and resentment, that it has proved a cloud over my acquaintance.
It is not that on awaking I believe in the reality of the experience;
but it seems to have given a real shock to a delicate sympathy, so that
there has been an actual difficulty on meeting the friend upon the same
terms as formerly, even though one may relate the dream incident and
laugh over it with him.
These are indubitably very mysterious experiences; and I cannot say
that I think that they are explicable upon any ordinary hypothesis;
that one should thus create a sense of sympathy or misunderstanding by
the exercise of involuntary imagination which should have a real power
to affect one's relations with a person--here I feel myself on the
threshold of a very deep mystery indeed.