But I do not so much object to these ordeals as to some social
experiences which I have in dreams. I cannot understand why one should
dream of being slighted or snubbed in society, but this is what I
have done more than once, though never perhaps so signally as in the
instance I am about to give. I found myself in a large room, where
people were sitting at lunch or supper around small tables, as is the
custom, I am told, at parties in the houses of our nobility and gentry.
I was feeling very well; not too proud, I hope, but in harmony with the
time and place. I was very well dressed, for me; and as I stood talking
to some ladies at one of the tables I was saying some rather brilliant
things, for me; I lounged easily on one foot, as I have observed men of
fashion do, and as I talked, I flipped my gloves, which I held in one
hand, across the other; I remember thinking that this was a peculiarly
distinguished action. Upon the whole I comported myself like one in the
habit of such affairs, and I turned to walk away to another table,
very well satisfied with myself and with the effect of my splendor
upon the ladies. But I had got only a few paces off when I perceived
(I could not see with my back turned) one of the ladies lean forward,
and heard her say to the rest in a tone of killing condescension and
patronage, “_I_ don’t see why that person isn’t as well as another.”
I say that I do not like this sort of dreams, and I never would have
them if I could help. They make me ask myself if I am really such a
snob when I am waking, and this in itself is very unpleasant. If I
am, I cannot help hoping that it will not be found out; and in my
dreams I am always less sorry for the misdeeds I commit than for their
possible discovery. I have done some very bad things in dreams which I
have no concern for whatever, except as they seem to threaten me with
publicity, or bring me within the penalty of the law; and I believe
this is the attitude of most other criminals, remorse being a fiction
of the poets, according to the students of the criminal class. It is
not agreeable to bring this home to one’s self, but the fact is not
without its significance in another direction. It implies that both in
the case of the dream-criminal and the deed-criminal there is perhaps
the same taint of insanity; only in the deed-criminal it is active,
and in the dream-criminal it is passive. In both, the inhibitory clause
that forbids evil is off, but the dreamer is not bidden to do evil as
the maniac is, or as the malefactor often seems to be. The dreamer is
purely unmoral; good and bad are the same to his conscience; he has
no more to do with right and wrong than the animals; he is reduced to
the state of the merely natural man; and perhaps the primitive men
were really like what we all are now in our dreams. Perhaps all life
to them was merely dreaming, and they never had anything like our
waking consciousness, which seems to be the offspring of conscience,
or else the parent of it. Until men passed the first stage of being,
perhaps that which we call the soul, for want of a better name, or a
worse, could hardly have existed, and perhaps in dreams the soul is
mostly absent now. The soul, or the principle that we call the soul,
is the supernal criticism of the deeds done in the body, which goes
perpetually on in the waking mind. While this watches, and warns or
commands, we go right; but when it is off duty we go neither right nor
wrong, but are as the beasts that perish.
A common theory is that the dreams which we remember are those we
have in the drowse which precedes sleeping and waking; but I do not
altogether accept this theory. In fact, there is very little proof of
it. We often wake from a dream, literally, but there is no proof that
we did not dream in the middle of the night the dream which is quite
as vividly with us in the morning as the one we wake from. I should
think that the dream which has some color of conscience in it was the
drowse-dream, and that the dream which has none is the sleep-dream; and
I believe that the most of our dreams will be found by this test to
be sleep-dreams. It is in these we may know what we would be without
our souls, without their supernal criticism of the mind; for the mind
keeps on working in them, with the lights of waking knowledge, both
experience and observation, but ruthlessly, remorselessly. By them we
may know what the state of the habitual criminal is, what the state of
the lunatic, the animal, the devil is. In them the personal character
ceases; the dreamer is remanded to his type.