gods on Olympus, and there saw chained to the throne of Jupiter a large
man with red hair and spotted countenance. When she asked the divine
messenger who had carried her to those regions, who that man was, he
told her it was the scourge of Italy and Sicily, a man who, when
unchained, would destroy many cities. She related her dream on the
following morning to her friends, but found no explanation, till several
years afterwards, when Dionysius ascended the throne. She happened to be
in the crowd which had assembled to witness the triumph of the new
monarch, and when she saw the tyrant, she uttered a loud cry, for she
had recognized in him the man in chains under Jupiter's throne. The cry
attracted attention; she was brought before Dionysius, forced to relate
her dream, and sent to be executed. Equally well known was the
remarkable dream which Socrates had a short time before his death. His
sentence had already been passed, but the day for its execution was not
yet made known, when Crito, one of his friends, came to him and informed
him that it would probably be ordered for the next morning. The great
philosopher replied with his usual calmness: "If such is the will of the
gods, be it so; but I do not think it will be to-morrow. I had, just
before you entered, a sweet dream. A woman of transcending beauty, and
dressed in a long white robe, appeared to me, called me by name, and
said, 'In three days you will return to your beloved Phthia' (Socrates'
native place)." He did not die till the third day.
Alexander the Great came more than once, during his remarkable career,
in peculiar contact with prophetic dreams. He was thus informed of the
coming of Cassander long before he ever saw him, and even of the
influence which the still unknown friend would have on his fate. When
the latter at last appeared at court, Alexander looked at him long and
anxiously, and recognized in him the man he had so often seen in his
dreams. It so happened, however, that before his suspicions assumed a
positive form, a Greek distich was mentioned to him, written to prove
the utter worthlessness of all dreams, and the effect of these lines,
combined with the discovery that Cassander was the son of his beloved
Antipater, induced him to lay aside all apprehensions. Nevertheless, his
friend subsequently poisoned him in cold blood. Not less famous was the
dream which warned Caius Gracchus of his own sad fate. He saw in his
sleep the shadow of his brother Tiberius, and heard him announce in a
clear voice, that Caius also would share his tragic end, and be murdered
like himself in the Capitol. The great Roman frequently related this
dream, and the historian Coelius records that he heard it repeated
during Gracchus' life-time. It is well known that the latter afterwards
became a tribune, and was killed while he held that office, in the same
manner as his brother. Cicero also had his warning dream. He was
escaping from his enemies, who had driven him out of Rome, and seeking
safety in his Antium villa. Here he dreamt, one night, that, as he was
wandering through a waste, deserted country, the Consul Marius met him,
accompanied by the usual retinue, and adorned with all the insignia of
his rank, and asked him why he was so melancholy, and why he had fled
from Rome. When he had answered the question, Marius took him by his
right hand, and summoning his chief officer to his side, ordered him to
carry the great orator to the temple of Jupiter, built by Marius
himself, while he assured Cicero he would there meet with new hopes. It
was afterwards ascertained that at the very hour of the dream, the
Senate had been discussing in the temple of Jupiter the speedy return of
Cicero. It would have been well for the great Caesar, also, if he had
deigned to listen to the warning voice of dreams, for in the night
before his murder, his wife, Calphurnia, saw him, in a dream, fall
wounded and copiously bleeding into her arms, and there end his life.
She told him of her dream, and on her knees besought him not to go out
on that day; but Caesar, fearing he might be suspected of giving undue
weight to a woman's dreams, made light of her fears, went to the Senate,
and met his tragic fate. Among later Romans the Emperor Theodosius was
most strikingly favored by dreams, if we may rely upon the statement of
Ammianus Marcellinus (I. 29). Two courtiers, anxious to ascertain who
should succeed the Emperor Valens on the throne, employed a kind of
magic instrument, resembling the modern psychograph, and succeeded in
deciphering the letters Theod. Their discovery became known to the
jealous emperor, who ordered not only Theodorus, his second secretary of
state, to be executed, but with him a large number of eminent personages
whose names began with the ominous five letters. For some unknown
reasons, Theodosius, then in Spain, escaped his suspicions, and yet it
was he, who, when Valens fell in the war against the Goths, was summoned
home by the next emperor, Gratianus, to save the empire and assume the
supreme command of the army. When the successful general returned to
Byzantium to make his report to the emperor, he had himself a dream in
which he saw the great Patriarch of Antioch, Meletius, invest him with
the purple, and place the imperial crown upon his head. Gratianus,
struck by the brilliancy of the victory obtained at the moment of
supreme danger, made Theodosius Emperor of the East, and returned to
Rome. During the following year (380) a great council was held in
Constantinople, and here, amid a crowd of assembled dignitaries of the
church, Theodosius instantly recognized the Bishop of Antioch, whom he
had never seen except in his dream.
It is not generally known that the prediction of future greatness which
Shakespeare causes the three witches to convey to Macbeth, rests on an
historic basis. The announcement came to him, however, probably not at
an actual meeting, but by means of a prophetic dream, which presented to
the ambitious chieftain the appearance of an encounter with unearthly
agents. This presumption is strengthened by the first notice of the
mysterious event, which occurs, it is believed, in "Wyntownis Cronykil,"
where Macbeth is reported to have had a vivid dream of three weird
women, who foretold him his fate. Boethius derived his information from
this source, and for unknown reasons added not only Banquo as a witness
of the scene, but described it, also, first of all chroniclers, as an
actual meeting in a forest.
The report that the discovery of the famous Venus of Milo was due to a
dream, is not improbable, but is as yet without sufficient
authentication. The French Consul, Brest, who was a resident of Milo,
dreamed, it is stated, two nights in succession, that he had caused
diggings to be made at a certain place in the island and that his
efforts had been rewarded by the discovery of a beautiful statue. He
paid no attention to the dream; but it was repeated a third time, and
now so distinctly that he not only saw clearly all the surroundings,
but, also, the traces of a recent fire on the spot that had been pointed
out to him before. When he went on the following day to the place, he
instantly recognized the traces of fire, began his researches, and
discovered not only the Venus, now the glory of the Louvre, but, also,
several other most valuable statues. The well-known dream concerning
Major Andre is open to the same objections, although it is quoted in
good faith by Mrs. Crowe (i., p. 59). We are told that the Rev. Mr.
Cunningham, the poet, saw in a dream a man who was captured by armed
soldiers and hanged on a tree. To his utter consternation, he recognized
on the following day, in Major Andre, who was then for the first time
presented to him, the person he had seen in his dream. The latter was
then just on the point of embarking for America, where he met with his
sad fate.
A large number of dreams which are looked upon as prophetic, are nothing
more than the result of impressions made on the mind during sleep by
some bodily sensation. A swelling or an inflammation, for instance, is
frequently announced beforehand by pain in the affected part of the
body; the mind receives through the nerves an impression of this pain
and clothes it, during sleep and in a dream, into some familiar garb,
the biting of a serpent, the sting of an insect, or, even, the stab of
a dagger. An occasional coincidence serves to lend prestige to such
simple and perfectly natural dreams. Thus Stilling ("Jenseits," p. 284)
records the well-known story of a young man in Padua, who dreamed one
night that he was bitten by one of the marble lions which stand before
the church of St. Justina. Passing by the place, on the following day,
with some companions, he recalled the dream, and putting his hand into
the mouth of one of the lions, he said, defiantly: "Look at the fierce
lion that bit me last night." But at the same moment he uttered a
piercing cry and drew back his hand in great terror: a scorpion, hid in
the lion's mouth, had stung him, and the poor youth died of the venom.
The German poet Conrad Gessner dreamed, in a similar manner, that a
snake bit him in his left breast; the matter was completely forgotten,
when five days later a slight rising appeared on the spot, which
speedily developed itself into a fatal ulcer, and caused his death in a
short time.
Far more interesting, and occasionally productive of good results, are
dreams which might be called retrospective, inasmuch as they reveal
events of the past, which stand in some connection with present or
impending necessities. Many of these, no doubt, arise simply from the
recovery of forgotten facts in our memory; others, however, cannot be
thus explained. Justinus tells us of Dido's dream, in which she saw her
departed husband, Sichaeus, who pointed out to her his concealed
treasures and advised her to seek safety in flight. St. Augustine also
has an account of a father who after death appeared to his son and
showed him a receipted account, the loss of which had caused his heir
much anxiety. (_De cura pro mortuis_, ch. xi.) After Dante's death the
thirteenth canto of his Paradise could nowhere be found, and the
apparent loss filled all Italy with grief and sorrow. His son, Pietro
Alighieri, however, saw a long time afterwards, in a dream, his father,
who came to his bedside and told him that the missing papers were
concealed under a certain plank near the window at which he had been in
the habit of writing. It was only when all other researches had proved
vain, that, attention was paid to the dream; but when the plank was
examined the canto was found in the precise place which the dream had
indicated.
A similar dream of quite recent occurrence was accidentally more
thoroughly authenticated than is generally the case with such events.
The beautiful wife of Baron Alphonse de Rothschild of Paris had lost a
valuable ring while hunting in the woods near her castle of Ferrieres.
It so happened that early associations made the jewel specially dear to
her, and she felt the loss grievously; a reward of fifteen hundred
francs was, therefore, offered at once for its recovery. The night after
the hunt, the daughter of one of the keepers saw in a dream an unknown
man of imposing appearance, who told her to go at daybreak to a certain
crossroad in the forest, where she would find the ring at the foot of a
beech-tree, close to the highway. She awakes, dresses herself at once,
and goes to the place of which she has dreamed; after half an hour's
walk she reaches the crossroads and almost at the same moment sees
something glittering and shining like a firefly, picks it up, and
behold! it is the ring. The girl had not even seen the hunt, nor did she
know anything of the loss of the jewel; the whole occurrence, and the
place where it was lost, all were pointed out to her in her dream. (_Le
Monde Illustre_, Dec. 15, 1860).
It has already been mentioned that the question has often been mooted
whether the mind was really quite at rest during sleep, or still
operative in dreams. Some authors deny its activity altogether; others
admit a partial activity. The philosopher Kant went so far as to
maintain that perceptions had during sleep were clearer and fuller than
those of the day, because of the perfect rest of the other senses.
Recollection, alone, he added, was missing, because the mind acted in
sleep without the cooperation of the body.
There are, however, certain facts which seem to prove that the mind
does, at least, not altogether cease its activity while the body is
asleep. How else could we explain the power many persons undoubtedly
possess to awake at a fixed hour, and the success with which, more than
once, great mental efforts have been made during profound sleep? Of the
latter, Tartini's famous sonata is a striking instance. He had
endeavored in vain to finish this great work; inspiration would not
come, and he had abandoned the task in despair. During the night he had
a dream in which he once more tried his best, but in vain; at the moment
of despair, however, the Devil appeared to him and promised to finish
the work in return for his soul. The composer, nothing loath, surrenders
his soul and hears his magnificent work gloriously completed on the
violin. He wakes up in perfect delight, goes to his desk, and at once
writes down his "Devil's Sonata." Even children are known occasionally
to be able to give intelligent answers while fast asleep; the questions,
however, must be in accordance with the current of their thoughts,
otherwise they are apt to be aroused. A case is quoted by Reil of two
soldiers who used, at times, to keep up an uninterrupted conversation
during a whole night, while they were to all appearances fast asleep. A
lady, also, was unable to refuse answers to questions put to her at
night, and had at last to lock herself in carefully whenever she went to
sleep.
Hence it is that some of the most profound thinkers who have discussed
the subject of dreams, like Descartes and Leibnitz, Jouffroy and Dugald
Stewart, Richard and Carus, with a number of others, assert the
uninterrupted wakefulness of the mind. Some authors believe that the
spiritual part of man needs no sleep, but delights in the comfort of
feeling that the body is in perfect repose, and of forgetting, by these
means, for a time the troubles of daily life, and the responsibilities
of our earthly existence. They base this view upon the fact, that, as
far as we can judge, the mind is, during sleep, independent of the body
and the outer world. Thinking is quite possible during sleep without
dreaming, and certain bodily sensations, even, are correctly perceived,
as when we turn over in our sleep, because lying on one side produces
pain or uneasiness. We not only talk while we are asleep, but laugh or
weep, sigh or groan. A slight noise, a whispered word, affect the course
of our thoughts, and produce new images in our dreams, as certain
affections and even the pressure upon certain organs are sure to produce
invariably the same dreams. Space and time disappear, however, and
naturally, because we can measure them only by the aid of our senses,
and these are, for the time, inactive. Hence Dugald Stewart ascribes the
manner in which a moment's dream often comprises a year, or a whole
lifetime, to the fact that, when we are asleep, the images created by
our imagination appear to be realities, while those which we form when
we are awake are known to us to be mere fictions, and hence not subject
to the laws of time.
It will not surprise us, therefore, to find that this activity of the
mind, deprived of the usual means of making itself known to others by
gesture, sound, or action, seeks frequently a symbolical utterance, and
this is the grain of truth here also hid under the vast amount of
rubbish, known as the interpretation of dreams. Troubles and
difficulties may thus appear as storms; sorrow and grief as tears;
troubled waters may represent pain, and smooth ice impending danger; a
dry river-bed an approaching famine, and pretty flowers great joy to
come, provided, always, we are disposed to admit a higher class of
prophetic dreams. Such a view is supported by high authority, for since
the days of Aristotle, great writers, divines as well as philosophers,
have endeavored to classify dreams according to their nature and
importance. The great reformer, Melanchthon, in his work on the soul,
divided them into common dreams, void of importance; prophetic dreams,
arising from the individual gifts of the sleeper; divine dreams,
inspired by God either directly or through the agency of angels, and
finally, demoniac dreams, such as the witches' sabbath. One great
difficulty attending all such classification arises, however, from the
well-known fact, already alluded to, that external sensations are by far
the most frequent causes of dreams. Even these have been systematically
arranged by some writers, most successfully, perhaps, in the work of
Maine de Biran, but he overlooks again the numerous cases in which
external noises and similar accidents produce a whole train of thoughts.
Thus Pope dreamed of a Spaniard who impudently entered his library,
ransacked the books on the shelves, and turned a deaf ear to all his
remonstrances. The impression was so forcible that he questioned all his
servants, and investigated the matter thoroughly, till he was finally
forced to acknowledge that the whole transaction was a dream caused by
the fall of a book in his library, which he heard in his sleep. A still
more remarkable case occurred once in a hotel in Dantzic, where not one
person only, but all the guests, without exception, dreamed of the
sudden arrival of a number of travelers, who disturbed the whole house,
and took possession of their rooms with unusual clatter and noise. Not
one had arrived, but during the night a violent storm had arisen,
causing doors to slam and window-shutters to flap against the house,
noises which had aroused in more than fifty people precisely the same
impressions.
IV.
VISIONS.
Concipiendis visionibus quas phantasias vocant.
--QUINTILIAN.
Visions, that is, the perception of apparently tangible objects in the
outer world, which only exist in our imagination, have been known from
time immemorial among all nations on earth. They are, in themselves,
perfectly natural, and can frequently be traced back without difficulty
to bodily affections or a disordered state of the mind, so that many
eminent physicians dispose of them curtly as mere incidental symptoms of
congestion or neuralgia. They may present real men and things, known
beforehand, and now reproduced in such a manner as to appear
objectively; or they may be ideal forms, the product of the moment, and
incompatible with the laws of actual life. Persons who have visions and
know nothing of their true nature, are apt to become intensely excited,
as if they had been transferred into another world. The images they
behold seem to them of supernatural origin, and may inspire them with
lofty thoughts and noble impulses, but only too frequently they disturb
their peace of mind and lead them to crime or despair.
When visions extend to other senses besides sight, and the peculiar
state of mind by which they are caused affects different parts of the
body at once, they are called hallucinations; most frequent among insane
people, of whom, according to Esquirol, eighty in a hundred are thus
affected, they are generally quite insignificant; while visions through
the eye, are often accompanied by very remarkable magic phenomena. Thus
the visions which great men like Cromwell and Descartes, Byron or
Goethe, record of their own experience, were evidently signs of the
great energy of their mental life, while in others they are as clearly
symptoms of disease. Ascribed by the ancients to divine influence,
Christianity has invariably denounced them--when not indubitably
inspired by God, as in the case of the martyr Stephen and the apostle
St. John--as works of the Devil. At all times they have been
communicated to others, either by contagion or, in rare cases, by the
imposition of hands, as they have been artificially produced. Thus
extreme bodily fatigue and utter prostration after long illness are apt
to cause hallucinations. Albert Smith, for instance, while ascending
Mont Blanc, and feeling utterly exhausted, saw all his surroundings
clearly with his eyes, and yet, at the same time, beheld marvelous
things with the so-called inner sense. A Swiss who, in 1848, during a
severe cold, crossed from Wallis to Kandersteg by the famous Gemmi Pass,
eight thousand feet high, saw on his way a number of men shoveling the
snow from his path, fellow-travelers climbing up on all sides, and
rolling masses of snow which changed into dogs; he heard the blows of
axes and the laughing and singing of distant shepherds, while his road
was utterly deserted, and not a human soul within many miles. His hands
and feet were found frozen when he arrived at last at his quarters for
the night, and ten days later he died from the effects of his exposure.
During the retreat of the French from Russia the poor sufferers, frozen
and famished, were continually tormented by similar hallucinations,
which increased their sufferings at times to such a degree as to lead
them to commit suicide. Another frequent cause of visions is
long-continued fasting combined with more or less ascetic devotion. This
is said to explain why the prophets of the Old Testament were so
vigorously forbidden to indulge in wine or rich fare. Thus Aaron was
told: "Do not drink wine nor strong drink, thou nor thy sons with thee,
when ye go into the tabernacle" (Levit. x. 9); Moses remained forty
days, and "neither did eat bread nor drink wine," when he was on Mount
Sinai (Deuter. ix. 9); the Nazarites were ordered not to "drink any
liquor of grapes, nor to eat moist grapes or dried," and even to abstain
from vinegar (Numbers vi. 3), and Daniel and his companions had nothing
but "pulse to eat and water to drink" (Dan. i. 12), in order to prepare
them for receiving "wisdom and knowledge and the understanding of dreams
and visions."
Narcotics also, and, in our day, most of the anaesthetics can produce
visions and hallucinations, but the result is in all such cases much
less interesting than when they are produced spontaneously. Tobacco and
opium, betel, hasheesh, and coca are the principal means employed; but
Siberia has besides its narcotic mushrooms, Polynesia its ava, New
Granada and the Himalaya the thorn-apple, Florida its emetic apalachine,
and the northern regions of America and Europe have their ledum. The
most effective among these narcotics seems to be the Indian hemp, since
the visions it produces surpass even the marvelous effects of opium, as
has been recently again most graphically described by Bayard Taylor.
Laughing-gas, also, has frequently similar effects, and affords,
besides, the precious privilege of freedom from the painful, often
excruciating consequences of other narcotics. When perfumes are employed
for the express purpose of producing visions, it is difficult to
ascertain how much is due to their influence, and how much to the
over-excited mind of the seer. Benvenuto Cellini describes--though
probably not in the most trustworthy manner--the amazing effect produced
upon himself and a boy by his side, by the perfumes which a priest burnt
in the Coliseum. The whole vast building seemed to him filled with
demons, and the boy saw thousands of threatening men, four huge giants,
and fire bursting out in countless places. The great artist was told, at
the same time, that a great danger was threatening him, and that he
would surely lose his beloved Angelica within the month; both events
occurred as predicted, and thus proved that in this case at least magic
phenomena had accompanied the visions. (_Goethe, B. Cellini_, l. iv. ch.
2.)