There are things in dreams very awful, which would not be at all so in
waking; quite witless and aimless things, which at the time were of
such baleful effect that it remains forever. I remember dreaming when
I was quite a small boy, not more than ten years old, a dream which
is vivider in my mind now than anything that happened at the time.
I suppose it came remotely from my reading of certain Tales of the
Grotesque and the Arabesque, which had just then fallen into my hands;
and it involved simply an action of the fire-company in the little town
where I lived. They were working the brakes of the old fire-engine,
which would seldom respond to their efforts, and as their hands rose
and fell they set up the heart-shaking and soul-desolating cry of “Arms
Poe, arms Poe, arms Poe!” This and nothing more was the body of my
horror; and if the reader is not moved by it the fault is his and not
mine; for I can assure him that nothing in my experience has been more
dreadful to me.
I can hardly except the dismaying apparition of a clown, whom I once
saw, somewhat later in life, rise through the air in a sitting posture,
and float lightly over the house-roof, snapping his fingers, and
vaguely smiling, while the antennæ on his forehead, which clowns have
in common with some other insects, nodded elastically. I do not know
why this portent should have been so terrifying, or indeed that it was
a portent at all, for nothing ever came of it; what I know is that it
was to the last degree threatening and awful. I never got anything but
joy out of the circuses where this dream must have originated, but the
pantomime of Don Giovanni, which I saw at the theatre, was as grewsome
to me waking as it was to me dreaming. The statue of the Commendatore,
in getting down from his horse to pursue the wicked hero (I think
that is what he gets down for), set an example by which a long line
of statues afterwards profited in my dreams. For many years, and I do
not know but quite up to the time when I adopted burglars as the theme
of my nightmares, I was almost always chased by a marble statue with
an uplifted arm, and almost always I ran along the verge of a pond to
escape it. I believe that I got this pond out of my remote childhood,
and that it may have been a fish-pond embowered by weeping-willows
which I used to admire in the door-yard of a neighbor. I have somehow
a greater respect for the material of this earlier nightmare than I
have for that of the later ones, and no doubt the reader will agree
with me that it is much more romantic to be pursued by a statue than
to be threatened by burglars. It is but a few hours ago, however, that
I saved myself from these inveterate enemies by waking up just in
time for breakfast. They did not come with that light of dark-lanterns
shining under the door, or I should have known them at once, and not
had so much bother; but they intimated their presence in the catch of
the lock, which would not close securely, and there was some question
at first whether they were not ghosts. I thought of tying the door-knob
on the inside of my room to my bedpost (a bedpost that has not been
in existence for fifty years), but after suffering awhile I decided
to speak to them from an upper window. By this time they had turned
into a trio of harmless, necessary tramps, and at my appeal to them,
absolutely nonsensical as I now believe it to have been, to regard the
peculiar circumstances, whatever they were or were not, they did really
get up from the back porch where they were seated and go quietly away.
Burglars are not always so easily to be entreated. On one occasion,
when I found a party of them digging at the corner of my house on
Concord Avenue in Cambridge, and opened the window over them to
expostulate, the leader looked up at me in well-affected surprise. He
lifted his hand, with a twenty-dollar note in it, toward me, and said:
“Oh! Can you change me a twenty-dollar bill?” I expressed a polite
regret that I had not so much money about me, and then he said to the
rest, “Go ahead, boys,” and they went on undermining my house. I do not
know what came of it all.
Of ghosts I have seldom dreamed, so far as I can remember; in fact,
I have never dreamed of the kind of ghosts that we are all more or
less afraid of, though I have dreamed rather often of the spirits of
departed friends. But I once dreamed of dying, and the reader, who has
never died yet, may be interested to know what it is like. According to
this experience of mine, which I do not claim is typical, it is like
a fire kindling in an air-tight stove with paper and shavings; the
gathering smoke and gases suddenly burst into flame, and puff the door
out, and all is over.
I have not yet been led to execution for the many crimes I have
committed in my dreams, but I was once in the hands of a barber, who
added to the shaving and shampooing business the art of removing his
customers’ heads in treatment for headache. As I took my seat in his
chair I had some lingering doubts as to the effect of a treatment so
drastic, and I ventured to mention the case of a friend of mine, a
gentleman somewhat eminent in the law, who after several weeks was
still going about without his head. The barber did not attempt to
refute my position. He merely said, “Oh, well, he had such a very thick
sort of a head, anyway.”
This was a sarcasm, but I think it was urged as a reason, though it
may not have been. We rarely bring away from sleep the things that
seem so brilliant to us in our dreams. Verse is especially apt to
fade away, or turn into doggerel in the memory, and the witty sayings
which we contrive to remember will hardly bear the test of daylight.
The most perfect thing of the kind out of my own dreams was something
that I seemed to wake with the very sound of in my ears. It was after
a certain dinner, which had been rather uncommonly gay, with a good
deal of very good talk, which seemed to go on all night, and when I
woke in the morning some one was saying, “Oh, I shouldn’t at all mind
his robbing Peter to pay Paul, if I felt sure that Paul would get the
money.” This I think really humorous, and an extremely neat bit of
characterization; I feel free to praise it, because it was not I who
said it.