I hold the belief that the Gift of Dreams is a valuable literary
endowment—that if by some art not now understood the elusive fancies
that it supplies could be caught and fixed and made to serve we should
have a literature “exceeding fair.” In captivity and domestication
the gift could doubtless be wonderfully improved, as animals bred to
service acquire new capacities and powers. By taming our dreams we
shall double our working hours and our most fruitful labor will be done
in sleep. Even as matters are, Dreamland is a tributary province, as
witness “Kubla Khan.”
What is a dream? A loose and lawless collocation of memories—a
disorderly succession of matters once present in the waking
consciousness. It is a resurrection of the dead, pell-mell—ancient and
modern, the just and the unjust—springing from their cracked tombs,
each “in his habit as he lived,” pressing forward confusedly to have
an audience of the Master of the Revel, and snatching one another’s
garments as they run. Master? No; he has abdicated his authority and
they have their will of him; his own is dead and does not rise with
the rest. His judgment, too, is gone, and with it the capacity to
be surprised. Pained he may be and pleased, terrified and charmed,
but wonder he can not feel. The monstrous, the preposterous, the
unnatural—these all are simple, right and reasonable. The ludicrous
does not amuse, nor the impossible amaze. The dreamer is your only true
poet; he is “of imagination all compact.”
Imagination is merely memory. Try to imagine something that you have
never observed, experienced, heard of or read about. Try to conceive an
animal, for example, without body, head, limbs or tail—a house without
walls or roof. But, when awake, having assistance of will and judgment,
we can somewhat control and direct; we can pick and choose from
memory’s store, taking that which serves, excluding, though sometimes
with difficulty, what is not to the purpose; asleep, our fancies
“inherit us.” They come so grouped, so blended and compounded the one
with another, so wrought of one another’s elements, that the whole
seems new; but the old familiar units of conception are there, and none
beside. Waking or sleeping, we get from imagination nothing new but new
adjustments: “the stuff that dreams are made on” has been gathered by
the physical senses and stored in memory, as squirrels hoard nuts. But
one, at least, of the senses contributes nothing to the fabric of the
dream: no one ever dreamed an odor. Sight, hearing, feeling, possibly
taste, are all workers, making provision for our nightly entertainment;
but Sleep is without a nose. It surprises that those keen observers,
the ancient poets, did not so describe the drowsy god, and that their
obedient servants, the ancient sculptors, did not so represent him.
Perhaps these latter worthies, working for posterity, reasoned that
time and mischance would inevitably revise their work in this regard,
conforming it to the facts of nature.
Who can so relate a dream that it shall seem one? No poet has so light
a touch. As well try to write the music of an Æolian harp. There is a
familiar species of the genus Bore (_Penetrator intolerabilis_) who
having read a story—perhaps by some master of style—is at the pains
elaborately to expound its plot for your edification and delight; then
thinks, good soul, that now you need not read it. “Under substantially
similar circumstances and conditions” (as the interstate commerce law
hath it) I should not be guilty of the like offence; but I purpose
herein to set forth the plots of certain dreams of my own, the
“circumstances and conditions” being, as I conceive, dissimilar in
this, that the dreams themselves are not accessible to the reader. In
endeavoring to make record of their poorer part I do not indulge the
hope of a higher success. I have no salt to put upon the tail of a
dream’s elusive spirit.
I was walking at dusk through a great forest of unfamiliar trees.
Whence and whither I did not know. I had a sense of the vast extent
of the wood, a consciousness that I was the only living thing in it.
I was obsessed by some awful spell in expiation of a forgotten crime
committed, as I vaguely surmised, against the sunrise. Mechanically
and without hope, I moved under the arms of the giant trees along a
narrow trail penetrating the haunted solitudes of the forest. I came
at length to a brook that flowed darkly and sluggishly across my path,
and saw that it was blood. Turning to the right, I followed it up a
considerable distance, and soon came to a small circular opening in
the forest, filled with a dim, unreal light, by which I saw in the
center of the opening a deep tank of white marble. It was filled with
blood, and the stream that I had followed up was its outlet. All round
the tank, between it and the enclosing forest—a space of perhaps ten
feet in breadth, paved with immense slabs of marble—were dead bodies
of men—a score; though I did not count them I knew that the number
had some significant and portentous relation to my crime. Possibly
they marked the time, in centuries, since I had committed it. I only
recognized the fitness of the number, and knew it without counting. The
bodies were naked and arranged symmetrically around the central tank,
radiating from it like spokes of a wheel. The feet were outward, the
heads hanging over the edge of the tank. Each lay upon its back, its
throat cut, blood slowly dripping from the wound. I looked on all this
unmoved. It was a natural and necessary result of my offence, and did
not affect me; but there was something that filled me with apprehension
and terror—a monstrous pulsation, beating with a slow, inevitable
recurrence. I do not know which of the senses it addressed, or if
it made its way to the consciousness through some avenue unknown to
science and experience. The pitiless regularity of this vast rhythm was
maddening. I was conscious that it pervaded the entire forest, and was
a manifestation of some gigantic and implacable malevolence.
Of this dream I have no further recollection. Probably, overcome by a
terror which doubtless had its origin in the discomfort of an impeded
circulation, I cried out and was awakened by the sound of my own voice.
The dream whose skeleton I shall now present occurred in my early
youth. I could not have been more than sixteen. I am considerably more
now, yet I recall the incidents as vividly as when the vision was
“of an hour’s age” and I lay cowering beneath the bed-covering and
trembling with terror from the memory.
I was alone on a boundless level in the night—in my bad dreams I am
always alone and it is usually night. No trees were anywhere in sight,
no habitations of men, no streams nor hills. The earth seemed to be
covered with a short, coarse vegetation that was black and stubbly, as
if the plain had been swept by fire. My way was broken here and there
as I went forward with I know not what purpose by small pools of water
occupying shallow depressions, as if the fire had been succeeded by
rain. These pools were on every side, and kept vanishing and appearing
again, as heavy dark clouds drove athwart those parts of the sky which
they reflected, and passing on disclosed again the steely glitter of
the stars, in whose cold light the waters shone with a black luster.
My course lay toward the west, where low along the horizon burned a
crimson light beneath long strips of cloud, giving that effect of
measureless distance that I have since learned to look for in Doré’s
pictures, where every touch of his hand has laid a portent and a curse.
As I moved I saw outlined against this uncanny background a silhouette
of battlements and towers which, expanding with every mile of my
journey, grew at last to an unthinkable height and breadth, till the
building subtended a wide angle of vision, yet seemed no nearer than
before. Heartless and hopeless I struggled on over the blasted and
forbidding plain, and still the mighty structure grew until I could
no longer compass it with a look, and its towers shut out the stars
directly overhead; then I passed in at an open portal, between columns
of cyclopean masonry whose single stones were larger than my father’s
house.
Within all was vacancy; everything was coated with the dust of
desertion. A dim light—the lawless light of dreams, sufficient unto
itself—enabled me to pass from corridor to corridor, and from room
to room, every door yielding to my hand. In the rooms it was a long
walk from wall to wall; of no corridor did I ever reach an end. My
footfalls gave out that strange, hollow sound that is never heard but
in abandoned dwellings and tenanted tombs. For hours I wandered in this
awful solitude, conscious of a seeking purpose, yet knowing not what
I sought. At last, in what I conceived to be an extreme angle of the
building, I entered a room of the ordinary dimensions, having a single
window. Through this I saw the same crimson light still lying along the
horizon in the measureless reaches of the west, like a visible doom,
and knew it for the lingering fire of eternity. Looking upon the red
menace of its sullen and sinister glare, there came to me the dreadful
truth which years later as an extravagant fancy I endeavored to
express in verse:
Man is long ages dead in every zone,
The angels all are gone to graves unknown;
The devils, too, are cold enough at last,
And God lies dead before the great white throne!
The light was powerless to dispel the obscurity of the room, and it
was some time before I discovered in the farthest angle the outlines
of a bed, and approached it with a prescience of ill. I felt that
here somehow the bad business of my adventure was to end with some
horrible climax, yet could not resist the spell that urged me to the
fulfilment. Upon the bed, partly clothed, lay the dead body of a
human being. It lay upon its back, the arms straight along the sides.
By bending over it, which I did with loathing but no fear, I could
see that it was dreadfully decomposed. The ribs protruded from the
leathern flesh; through the skin of the sunken belly could be seen the
protuberances of the spine. The face was black and shriveled and the
lips, drawn away from the yellow teeth, cursed it with a ghastly grin.
A fulness under the closed lids seemed to indicate that the eyes had
survived the general wreck; and this was true, for as I bent above
them they slowly opened and gazed into mine with a tranquil, steady
regard. Imagine my horror how you can—no words of mine can assist the
conception; the eyes were my own! That vestigial fragment of a vanished
race—that unspeakable thing which neither time nor eternity had wholly
effaced—that hateful and abhorrent scrap of mortality, still sentient
after death of God and the angels, was I!
There are dreams that repeat themselves. Of this class is one of my
own,[1] which seems sufficiently singular to justify its narration,
though truly I fear the reader will think the realms of sleep are
anything but a happy hunting-ground for my night-wandering soul. This
is not true; the greater number of my incursions into dreamland,
and I suppose those of most others, are attended with the happiest
results. My imagination returns to the body like a bee to the hive,
loaded with spoil which, reason assisting, is transmuted to honey
and stored away in the cells of memory to be a joy forever. But the
dream which I am about to relate has a double character; it is
strangely dreadful in the experience, but the horror it inspires is so
ludicrously disproportionate to the one incident producing it, that in
retrospection the fantasy amuses.
I am passing through an open glade in a thinly wooded country. Through
the belt of scattered trees that bound the irregular space there are
glimpses of cultivated fields and the homes of strange intelligences.
It must be near daybreak, for the moon, nearly at full, is low in the
west, showing blood-red through the mists with which the landscape is
fantastically freaked. The grass about my feet is heavy with dew, and
the whole scene is that of a morning in early summer, glimmering in
the unfamiliar light of a setting full moon. Near my path is a horse,
visibly and audibly cropping the herbage. It lifts its head as I am
about to pass, regards me motionless for a moment, then walks toward
me. It is milk-white, mild of mien and amiable in look. I say to
myself: “This horse is a gentle soul,” and pause to caress it. It keeps
its eyes fixed upon my own, approaches and speaks to me in a human
voice, with human words. This does not surprise, but terrifies, and
instantly I return to this our world.
The horse always speaks my own tongue, but I never know what it says. I
suppose I vanish from the land of dreams before it finishes expressing
what it has in mind, leaving it, no doubt, as greatly terrified by my
sudden disappearance as I by its manner of accosting me. I would give
value to know the purport of its communication.
Perhaps some morning I shall understand—and return no more to this our
world.
[1] At my suggestion the late Flora Macdonald Shearer put this drama
into sonnet form in her book of poems, _The Legend of Aulus_.