Apparently the greater part of dreams have no more mirth than sense
in them. This is perhaps because the man is in dreams reduced to
the brute condition, and is the lawless inferior of the waking man
intellectually, as the lawless in waking are always the inferiors of
the lawful. Some loose thinkers suppose that if we give the rein to
imagination it will do great things, but it will really do little
things, foolish and worthless things, as we witness in dreams, where it
is quite unbridled. It must keep close to truth, and it must be under
the law if it would work strongly and sanely. The man in his dreams is
really lower than the lunatic in his deliriums. These have a logic of
their own; but the dreamer has not even a crazy logic.
“Like a dog, he hunts in dreams,”
and probably his dreams and the dog’s are not only alike, but are of
the same quality. In his wicked dreams the man is not only animal, he
is devil, so wholly is he let into his evils, as the Swedenborgians
say. The wrong is indifferent to him until the fear of detection and
punishment steals in upon him. Even then he is not sorry for his
misdeed, as I have said before; he is only anxious to escape its
consequences.
It seems probable that when this fear makes itself felt he is near to
waking; and probably when we dream, as we often do, that the thing is
only a dream, and hope for rescue from it by waking, we are always just
about to wake. This double effect is very strange, but still more
strange is the effect which we are privy to in the minds of others,
when they not merely say things to us which are wholly unexpected,
but think things that we know they are thinking, and that they do not
express in words. A great many years ago, when I was young, I dreamed
that my father, who was in another town, came into the room where I was
really lying asleep, and stood by my bed. He wished to greet me, after
our separation, but he reasoned that if he did so, I should wake, and
he turned and left the room without touching me. This process in his
mind, which I knew as clearly and accurately as if it had apparently
gone on in my own, was apparently confined to his mind as absolutely as
anything could be that was not spoken or in any wise uttered.
Of course it was of my agency, like any other part of the dream,
and it was something like the operation of the novelist’s intention
through the mind of his characters. But in this there is the author’s
consciousness that he is doing it all himself, while in my dream,
this reasoning in the mind of another was something that I felt
myself mere witness of. In fact there is no analogy, so far as I can
make out, between the process of literary invention and the process
of dreaming. In the invention, the critical faculty is vividly and
constantly alert; in dreaming, it seems altogether absent. It seems
absent, too, in what we call day-dreaming, or that sort of dramatizing
action which perhaps goes on perpetually in the mind, or some minds.
But this day-dreaming is not otherwise any more like night-dreaming
than invention is; for the man is never more actively and consciously a
man, and never has a greater will to be fine and high and grand than in
his day-dreams, while in his night-dreams he is quite willing to be a
miscreant of any worst sort.
It is very remarkable, in view of this fact, that we have now and
then, though ever so much more rarely, dreams that are as angelic as
those others are demoniac. Is it possible that then the dreamer is let
into his goods (the word is Swedenborg’s again), instead of his evils?
It may be supposed that in sleep the dreamer lies passive, while his
proper soul is away, and other spirits, celestial and infernal, have
free access to his mind, and abuse it to their own ends in the one
case, and use it in his behalf in the other.
That would be an explanation, but nothing seems quite to hold in regard
to dreams. If it is true, why should the dreamer’s state so much
oftener be imbued with evil than with good? It might be answered that
the evil forces are much more positive and aggressive than the good;
or, that the love of the dreamer, which is his life, being mainly evil,
invites the wicked spirits oftener. But that is a point which I would
rather leave each dreamer to settle for himself. The greater number of
every one’s dreams, like the romantic novel, I fancy, concern incident
rather than character, and I am not sure, after all, that the dream
which convicts the dreamer of an essential baseness is commoner than
the dream that tells in his favor morally.
I dare say every reader of this paper has had dreams so amusing that he
has wakened himself from them by laughing, and then not found them so
very funny, or perhaps not been able to recall them at all. I have had
at least one of this sort, remarkable for other reasons, which remains
perfect in my mind, though it is now some ten years old. One of the
children had been exposed to a very remote chance of scarlet-fever at
the house of a friend, and had been duly scolded for the risk, which
was then quite forgotten. I dreamed that this friend, however, was
giving a ladies’ lunch, at which I was unaccountably and invisibly
present, and the talk began to run upon the scarlet-fever cases in
her family. She said that after the last she had fumigated the whole
house for seventy-two hours (the period seemed very significant and
important in my dream), and had burned everything she could lay her
hands on.
“And what did the nurse burn?” asked one of the other ladies.
The hostess began to laugh: “The nurse didn’t burn a thing!”
Then all the rest burst out laughing at the joke, and the laughter woke
me, to see the boy sitting up in his bed, and hear him saying, “Oh, I
am so sick!”
It was the nausea which announces scarlet-fever, and for six weeks
after that we were in quarantine. Very likely the fear of the contagion
had been in my nether mind all the time, but, so far as consciousness
could testify of it, I had wholly forgotten it.