_FEAR IN CHILDREN. DREAMS_
I
The one who brings up a child represents its brain. Every ugly thing
told to the child, every shock, every fright given him, will remain
like minute splinters in the flesh, to torture him all his life long.
An old soldier, whom I asked what his greatest fears had been, answered
me thus: 'I have only had one, but it pursues me still. I am nearly
seventy years old, I have looked death in the face I do not know how
many times, I have never lost heart in any danger, but when I pass a
little old church in the shades of the forest, or a deserted chapel
in the mountains, I always remember a neglected oratory in my native
village, and I shiver and look around, as though seeking the corpse of
a murdered man which I once saw carried into it when a child, and with
which an old servant wanted to shut me up to make me good.’
Anxiety, fear, horror will twine themselves perpetually around the
memory, like deadly ivy choking the light of reason. At every step
we remember the terrors of childhood: the vaults of a cellar, the
dark arch of a bridge, the cross-roads losing themselves in the
darkness, the crosses hidden amidst the bushes of a cemetery, a dim
light flickering far away in the darkness of night, a lonely cave
washed by the waves of the sea, the ruins of an uninhabited castle,
the mysterious silence of a deserted tower, breathe out the memory of
childish fear. The eye of the child seems to cast one more look on
these scenes from out of the very depths of the soul.
Not only the mother, the nurse, the maid, or the servants, but hundreds
of generations have worked to denaturalise the brains of children with
the same barbarity as those wild tribes who distort the heads of their
children by pressure, deforming what they think to beautify.
The children of ancient Greece and Rome used to be frightened with the
lamias who would suck their blood, with the masks of the atellans, the
Cyclops, or with a black Mercury who would come to carry them away.
And this most pernicious error in education has not yet disappeared,
for children are still frightened with the bogey-man, with stories
of imaginary monsters, the ogre, the hobgoblin, the wizard, and the
witches.
Every now and then children are told: 'This will peck at you,’ 'That
will bite you,’ 'Now I’ll call the dog,’ 'There’s the sweep coming,’
and a hundred other terrors which make the tears well up and spoil
their disposition, making their life a burden by incessantly agitating
them with threats, with tortures, which will make them timid and
shrinking for the rest of their life.
The imagination of children is far more vivid and excitable than in
adults. When a child is naturally timorous, it is better not to leave
it in the dark, but to keep a night-light burning in the room, so that,
on waking, it may at once recognise the place, and its fancies may
not assume an air of reality. The child’s eye is much more apt than
ours to trace pursuing spectres in the outlines of accustomed objects.
The stories told them in the evening, any exciting emotions towards
night-time, are most certainly reproduced in their dreams.
A turkey-cock, ten days old, that had never heard the cry of the
falcon, disappeared with the rapidity of lightning when it heard
the cry the first time, hiding itself in a corner, where it cowered
motionless and silent for more than ten minutes.
Spalding took a brood of chickens, a week old, and while they were
chirping around the hen in the meadow, he let fly a falcon. At once
the chickens tried to hide in the grass and bushes, and the hen, that
had always been kept shut up, so that she might have no experience
of enemies, precipitated herself with such violence on the falcon on
seeing it that she would certainly have killed it. Now neither she nor
her first brood had ever seen a bird of prey. Spalding, in order to
assure himself that it really is instinct which causes the recognition
of enemies, had already let some pigeons fly, and these settled
near the hen without producing any disturbance or emotion, as in the
case of the falcon. We must therefore admit that there is an innate
recollection which constitutes fear.
II
Philosophers, always dominated by a sublime idea of human faculties,
have too much neglected the study of savages and children. And yet it
is here that we ought to begin, if it is true that one must proceed
from the simple to the complex. Physiologists seem, more than others,
to have recognised this necessity, in order to distinguish inherited
psychic facts from those which we are capable of acquiring by the
experience of the senses. Let the physiologist remain long days at home
with a sympathetic wife and a darling child, attentively observing and
writing the whole life of the latter; this is for him the best, the
ideal study.
My colleague, Prof. Preyer, one of the most distinguished of
embryologists, had this happy thought, and his book on the 'Soul of the
Child’[29] is one of the most interesting volumes of modern psychology.
[29] Preyer: _Die Seele des Kindes_. Jena, 1882.
Even the first day after birth the face of the child changes suddenly
if it is held towards the light from the window, or if its eyes are
shaded by a hand.
On the second day it shuts its eyes forcibly and immediately when
a lighted candle is brought near to it, and draws its head back
energetically if a light is held before its eyes on waking.
In this case the child responds through excessive sensitiveness, not
through fear. A child, a few months old, looking at the clouds or a
snow-covered surface, closes its eyes oftener and more forcibly than an
adult.
During the first month children do not wink at a sudden noise, or when
one makes a pretence of putting a finger into their eye.
In Prof. Preyer’s child this movement appeared for the first time on
the fifty-seventh day, and only from the sixtieth did it become regular
and constant. We cannot think that a child, nine weeks old, can have
any conception of danger, and that it closes its eyes and lifts its
hands from fear. It was certainly not the result of experience, as we
know that there had been no opportunity for it to learn the injurious
nature of many things.
Instead of entertaining the notion of fear, it seems more logical to
consider these facts as analogous to the shutting of the eyes during
the first hours of life.
The sudden shadow or sound constitutes a disagreeable fact, and the
disturbed nervous system responds by a reflex movement, just as many
children cry when they hear the first clap of thunder, although they do
not know what it is, and start when they suddenly hear a door bang or
some object fall.
Preyer noticed that in the seventh week his child started and lifted
its hands at any sudden noise without waking.
An expression of the greatest wonder can be produced in a child of
seven months old by opening and shutting a fan before it; but the
wide-open eye and mouth and the fixed look are not merely signs of
astonishment, for when one draws the infant away from the breast, it
expresses its lively desire to be fed again by the same attitude.
In these cases the eyes shine with a more abundant secretion of tears.
Wide-open eyes accompany the first smile. One notices that children
have a tendency to open their eyes in joy and close them in displeasure.
Children, like the insane and like animals, when they have had some
disagreeable experience, are frightened at everything which they do not
know. Sometimes fear appears suddenly; from one day to another a child
may become timid and frightened when it sees an unknown person, or if
the father or mother makes some unusual gesture, or calls loudly.
The fear which children have of dogs and cats, before they have learnt
why they are to be feared, is a consequence of heredity; even later,
when they have gained some experience, they are overcome with fear at
the sight of sucking pups or kittens, which would be ridiculous if
it were not an innate aversion. The same may be said of the fear of
falling when they make the first steps, although they have never yet
fallen, and of the fear which children have at the first sight of the
sea.
III
_Pavor nocturnus_ is a malady peculiar to children from the third to
the seventh year, and must not be confounded with nightmare.
The symptoms are the following: Sudden awaking of the child after a
few hours of profound sleep.--A vivid expression of great terror, the
eyes fixed on some point, as though on some apparition standing before
them.--Failure of consciousness: the child recognises no one, and
does not reply to questions.--Skin bathed in perspiration.--Stronger
cardiac pulsations.--Rapid pulse.--Laboured breath.--Trembling of the
limbs.--Temperature normal.
The intensity, duration, and frequency of these attacks vary greatly;
they last generally from five to twenty minutes, after which the
children recover consciousness and fall asleep.
In the morning they remember nothing. Rarely do the attacks occur
several times in the same night; they appear as a rule at intervals of
a few days, often disappearing altogether after occurring two or three
times.
The causes of this malady are hereditary or accidental. Pale, delicate,
thin, scrofulous, anæmic, very intelligent or irritable children are
easily attacked; predisposed to it also are children of excitable
parents, or of those troubled with nervous affections. Amongst
occasional causes of the _pavor nocturnus_ may be specially mentioned
strong emotions, fever, and diseases of the digestive organs. In
general the children recover; the prognosis, as we say, is favourable.
Some retain their excessive nervous excitability, are subject to
palpitation of the heart, but only in very exceptional conditions
have the attacks of _pavor nocturnus_ exercised a lastingly injurious
influence.
IV
The dreams of children are more real, vivid, fearful than of adults,
because their brain is excessively impressionable, as is shown by
the fact that things seen in childhood are indelibly impressed on
the memory, and because their life is made up of emotions, while
their weakness renders them more timorous, exaggerates every danger,
and makes every enemy appear disproportionately superior to them in
strength.
Emotions and fright may become so great in dreams that some children
have had actual epileptic fits in consequence, as has recently been
proved by Prof. Nothnagel.
In adults dreams seem sometimes so vividly real, that they resemble
delirious paroxysms. What terrible events have taken place, what
catastrophes at which we shudder, recognising the fragility of the
human mind and the awful power of dreams!
I quote a single case which took place in Glasgow in 1878.
A man, twenty-four years old, of the name of Fraser, rose suddenly
during the night, took his child and hurled it against the wall,
shattering its skull. The screams of his wife awakened him, when, to
his horror, he found that he had killed his son whom he had thought to
save from a wild animal which he had seen enter the room and spring on
to the child’s bed to devour it. Fraser gave himself up to justice at
once and was set at liberty, because it was evident that he had acted
unconsciously.
He was a workman, pale, of a nervous temperament, sluggish intellect,
and rather childish, but industrious at his work. His mother had
suffered all her life from epileptic attacks, eventually dying in a fit
of this kind. His father, too, was epileptic. His maternal aunt and
her children were insane; his sister died, as a child, in convulsions.
From his infancy he had been the victim of terrifying dreams, in which
he used to spring, screaming, out of bed. These dreams troubled him
especially when he had suffered any emotion during the day. He had once
saved his little sister from falling into the water, and this had made
such an impression on him that he often rose during the night, called
loudly to his sister, and clasped her in his arms as though to keep her
from falling. Sometimes he would awake, sometimes go back to bed, still
sleeping, and in the morning would feel depressed without remembering
anything. After his marriage in 1875 the attacks assumed a different
character.
He was pursued by terrible dreams, and used to spring out of bed
screaming 'Fire!’ or that his son was in convulsions, or that a wild
animal had got into the room, which he would then try to find and
hit with anything which fell into his hands. Several times he had
seized his wife, his father, and a friend who lived with him, by the
throat, nearly strangling them in the belief that he had caught the
wild animal. In these attacks his eyes were wide-open and full of
expression, and he saw all objects, although he was blind to everything
which did not agree with his mental illusions. It was in one of these
attacks that he killed his son.
And he was an affectionate father! The mind shudders at the thought of
his unspeakable grief when consciousness returned.