“Sleep has a wonderful power over all our faculties. Sometimes we seem
to have lost our moral faculty; as when we dream of doing that without
scruple or remorse, which, when awake, we could not bear to think of.
Sometimes memory is extinguished; as when we dream of conversing with
our departed friends, without remembering any thing of their death,
though it was, perhaps, one of the most striking incidents we had ever
experienced, and is seldom or never out of our thoughts when we are
awake.”
Even the most sensitive and amiable girls will dream of committing
murder, or the most awful crimes, without any sense of compunction. We
feel no surprise at the working of our own miracles; and we know not how
to avoid danger. I have myself dreamed of occurrences long past, as if
they were of to-day; have fretted in my sleep, on ideal events, and on
waking was for a moment wretched. But I have reflected, _awake_, on
these very events, and have not only felt resigned, but deemed them
benefits.
There was in the university of Gottingen the physician Walderstein. He
was a constant dreamer, and this is his account of one of these
illusions. “I dreamt that I was condemned to the stake, and during my
execution I was perfectly composed, and indeed _reasoned_ calmly on the
mode in which it was conducted;—whispering to myself, ‘Now I am
burning, and presently I shall be converted into a cinder.’” It seems
that he was dissatisfied with his dream, on account of this apathetic
calmness; and he concludes: “I was fearful I should become all thought,
and no feeling.” _I_ would say, he was all illusion and no judgment.
It is but lately that I dreamed I was reciting a metaphysical poem,
which my vanity whispered me possessed a deal of merit. During the
recitation I thought there was a turning up of noses, and of tongues
into cheeks—a very expressive sign of incredulity and satire. At length
a general murmur ran through the assembly that it was a complete
“boggle.” Nothing daunted, I assured them that it was a very abstruse
passage, and the fault was in the shallow comprehension of my audience.
Need I add, that I should blush at such an evasion in my waking
judgment?
How different also is our dream from a waking thought, in which we can
control the fancy!
If in the dream the chain be abruptly broken, the waking mind does not
then carry on the train, and if any thing occur in waking, associating
with the dream, to join the broken link, the dream is not completed, but
the ideas _revert_, or are retraced, to their source; and if any idea at
the origin of the dream be _re-excited_, there will be no consistent
continuance of it beyond the dream itself, or, if there be, it will bear
the stamp of reasoning, losing all connexion with the illusion. On the
contrary, if we read as we are falling asleep, we continue _in the
dream_ the subject of our study, but _erroneously_; and if we then start
and wake, we shall find that at the moment of slumber we had _changed
the integrity_ of our thinking. Be assured, then, that Virgil is correct
in this—
“She seems alone
To wander in her sleep, through ways unknown,
_Guideless_ and _dark_.”
CAST. And now, Sir Knight, deign to look on the other side of the
shield. Answer me with sincerity,—if your words be true, is not this a
high privilege of imaginative minds, to lift themselves out of the
gloomy atmosphere of this world of woe; to soar with fancy, not to
drudge with fact? How do I envy a romantic dreamer, like him of whom
Master Edmund Spenser writes,—
“——at length, some wonted slepe doth crowne
His new falne lids, dreames straight, tenne pound to one,
Out steps some faëry with quick motion,
And tells him wonders of some flourie vale.”
Sleep is indeed the reality of another existence.
ASTR. So breathed the thought of Heraclitus, in words like these,—that
“all men, whilst they are awake, are in one common world; but that each,
when he is asleep, is in a world of his own.” The fairies are his boon
and chosen compeers, and the sylphs are as much his handmaidens, as
those around the toilet of Belinda. We are indeed the happy children,
and, like them, our existence is a dream of felicity,—one long and
happy thought of the _present_, with no reflection or forethought to mar
its blisses.
Then the shades and memory of departed friends and lovers, are they not
around us as true and as beautiful as when they lived? The common
sentiment of enamoured dreamers is—
“I hear thy voice in dreams upon me softly call;
I see thy form as when thou wert a living thing.”
In the dream, ambition is lifted to the loftiest pinnacle of her high
aspirings; and power and riches are showered in profusion in the path of
their votaries from the cornucopia of fancy; and all this with a depth
and intensity that gilds for a time the moments of waking life. And I
agree with Saint Augustine, that if we sleep and dream in Paradise, our
existence will be perfectly felicitous.
But then, alas! the cruel waking from this world of pleasure. I have
breathed many a sigh of sympathy with Milton’s dream of his dead wife,
and with Crabbe, in his “World of Dreams.”
You remember, Evelyn, how oft you have wondered at my absence from our
college cœna. You thought not that I was then deeply studying how I
might gain a victory over my thoughts in sleep. As my waking memory
would, from some indefinite cause, be re-excited after it had seemed to
fade and die, so the subject of my dreams has been resumed after many
months, without any chain of relative thoughts in the interval. I
believed then that this might be a dream; that I had dreamt the same
before; but on the morning of the _second_ dream, reflection assured me
that on the morning of the _first_ I had known and thought on it. I was
waiting for a golden hour of inspiration, and it was granted me. One
night came o’er my slumber a dream of beauty: there was an innocent
happiness, a sense of purest pleasure, that might be the beatitude of a
peri ere she lost her place in Eden. In the morning, the dream was a
part of my being; I nursed it throughout the live-long day, and at night
lay me down to slumber, and again with the sleep came the dream. I was
thus the monarch of an ideal world: the dream was my life, so long as my
thoughts were on it concentrated, and even study was a _Rembrandt_
shadow on its brightness.