MY DREAM.
I think I will tell the dream I had. I cannot well account for the
beginning of it: the end will appear sufficiently explicable to those
who are quite satisfied that they get rid of the mystery of a thing when
they can associate it with something else with which they are familiar.
Such do not care to see that the thing with which they associate it
may be as mysterious as the other. For although use too often destroys
marvel, it cannot destroy the marvellous. The origin of our thoughts is
just as wonderful as the origin of our dreams.
In my dream I found myself in a pleasant field full of daisies and white
clover. The sun was setting. The wind was going one way, and the shadows
another. I felt rather tired, I neither knew nor thought why. With an
old man’s prudence, I would not sit down upon the grass, but looked
about for a more suitable seat. Then I saw, for often in our dreams
there is an immediate response to our wishes, a long, rather narrow
stone lying a few yards from me. I wondered how it could have come
there, for there were no mountains or rocks near: the field was part of
a level country. Carelessly, I sat down upon it astride, and watched the
setting of the sun. Somehow I fancied that his light was more sorrowful
than the light of the setting sun should be, and I began to feel very
heavy at the heart. No sooner had the last brilliant spark of his
light vanished, than I felt the stone under me begin to move. With the
inactivity of a dreamer, however, I did not care to rise, but wondered
only what would come next. My seat, after several strange tumbling
motions, seemed to rise into the air a little way, and then I found that
I was astride of a gaunt, bony horse--a skeleton horse almost, only he
had a gray skin on him. He began, apparently with pain, as if his joints
were all but too stiff to move, to go forward in the direction in
which he found himself. I kept my seat. Indeed, I never thought of
dismounting. I was going on to meet what might come. Slowly, feebly,
trembling at every step, the strange steed went, and as he went his
joints seemed to become less stiff, and he went a little faster. All at
once I found that the pleasant field had vanished, and that we were on
the borders of a moor. Straight forward the horse carried me, and the
moor grew very rough, and he went stumbling dreadfully, but always
recovering himself. Every moment it seemed as if he would fall to rise
no more, but as often he found fresh footing. At length the surface
became a little smoother, and he began a horrible canter which lasted
till he reached a low, broken wall, over which he half walked, half fell
into what was plainly an ancient neglected churchyard. The mounds were
low and covered with rank grass. In some parts, hollows had taken the
place of mounds. Gravestones lay in every position except the level or
the upright, and broken masses of monuments were scattered about. My
horse bore me into the midst of it, and there, slow and stiff as he
had risen, he lay down again. Once more I was astride of a long narrow
stone. And now I found that it was an ancient gravestone which I knew
well in a certain Sussex churchyard, the top of it carved into the rough
resemblance of a human skeleton--that of a man, tradition said, who had
been killed by a serpent that came out of a bottomless pool in the next
field. How long I sat there I do not know; but at last I saw the faint
gray light of morning begin to appear in front of me. The horse of death
had carried me eastward. The dawn grew over the top of a hill that here
rose against the horizon. But it was a wild dreary dawn--a blot of gray
first, which then stretched into long lines of dreary yellow and gray,
looking more like a blasted and withered sunset than a fresh sunrise.
And well it suited that waste, wide, deserted churchyard, if churchyard
I ought to call it where no church was to be seen--only a vast hideous
square of graves. Before me I noticed especially one old grave, the flat
stone of which had broken in two and sunk in the middle. While I sat
with my eyes fixed on this stone, it began to move; the crack in the
middle closed, then widened again as the two halves of the stone were
lifted up, and flung outward, like the two halves of a folding door.
From the grave rose a little child, smiling such perfect contentment as
if he had just come from kissing his mother. His little arms had flung
the stones apart, and as he stood on the edge of the grave next to me,
they remained outspread from the action for a moment, as if blessing the
sleeping people. Then he came towards me with the same smile, and took
my hand. I rose, and he led me away over another broken wall towards the
hill that lay before us. And as we went the sun came nearer, the pale
yellow bars flushed into orange and rosy red, till at length the edges
of the clouds were swept with an agony of golden light, which even my
dreamy eyes could not endure, and I awoke weeping for joy.
This waking woke my wife, who said in some alarm:
“What is the matter, husband?”
So I told her my dream, and how in my sleep my gladness had overcome me.
“It was this little darling that set you dreaming so,” she said, and
turning, put the baby in my arms.