“Dreams that wave before the half-shut eye,”
just closing for an afternoon nap. Then I invite to my vision a wide
landscape, with a cold wintry afternoon light upon it, and over this
plain I have bands and groups of people scurrying, in mediæval hose
of divers colors, and mediæval leathern jerkins, hugging themselves
against the frost, and very miserable. They affect me with a profound
compassion; they represent to me, somehow, the vast mass of humanity,
the mass that does the work, and earns the bread, and goes cold and
hungry through all the ages. I should be at a loss to say why this was
the effect, and I am utterly unable to say why these fore-dreams, which
I partially solicit, should have such a tremendous significance as they
seem to have. They are mostly of the most evanescent and intangible
character, but they have one trait in common. They always involve the
attribution of ethical motive and quality to material things, and
in their passage through my brain they promise me a solution of the
riddle of the painful earth in the very instant when they are gone
forever. They are of innumerable multitude, chasing each other with
the swiftness of light, and never staying to be seized by the memory,
which seems already drugged with sleep before their course begins. One
of these dreams, indeed, I did capture, and I found it to be the figure
8, but lying on its side, and in that posture involving the mystery and
the revelation of the mystery of the universe. I leave the reader to
imagine why.
As we grow older, I think we are less and less able to remember our
dreams. This is perhaps because the experience of youth is less dense,
and the empty spaces of the young consciousness are more hospitable
to these airy visitants. A few dreams of my later life stand out in
strong relief, but for the most part they blend in an indistinguishable
mass, and pass away with the actualities into a common oblivion. I
should say that they were more frequent with me than they used to be;
it seems to me that now I dream whole nights through, and much more
about the business of my waking life than formerly. As I earn my
living by weaving a certain sort of dreams into literary form, it might
be supposed that I would sometime dream of the personages in these
dreams, but I cannot remember that I have ever done so. The two kinds
of inventing, the voluntary and the involuntary, seem absolutely and
finally distinct.
Of the prophetic dreams which people sometimes have I have mentioned
the only one of mine which had any dramatic interest, but I have
verified in my own experience the theory of Ribot that approaching
disease sometimes intimates itself in dreams of the disorder impending,
before it is otherwise declared in the organism. In actual sickness I
think that I dream rather less than in health. I had a malarial fever
when I was a boy, and I had a sort of continuous dream in it that
distressed me greatly. It was of gliding down the school-house stairs
without touching my feet to the steps, and this was indescribably
appalling.
The anguish of mind that one suffers from the imaginary dangers of
dreams is probably of the same quality as that inspired by real peril
in waking. A curious proof of this happened within my knowledge not
many years ago. One of the neighbor’s children was coasting down a long
hill with a railroad at the foot of it, and as he neared the bottom
an express train rushed round the curve. The flag-man ran forward and
shouted to the boy to throw himself off his sled, but he kept on, and
ran into the locomotive, and was so hurt that he died. His injuries,
however, were to the spine, and they were of a kind that rendered
him insensible to pain while he lived. He talked very clearly and
calmly of his accident, and when he was asked why he did not throw
himself off his sled, as the flag-man bade him, he said, “_I thought
it was a dream_.” The reality had, through the mental stress, no doubt
transmuted itself to the very substance of dreams, and he had felt the
same kind and quality of suffering as he would have done if he had been
dreaming. The Norwegian poet and novelist, Björnstjerne Björnson, was
at my house shortly after this happened, and he was greatly struck by
the psychological implications of the incident; it seemed to mean for
him all sorts of possibilities in the obscure realm where it cast a
fitful light.
But such a glimmer soon fades, and the darkness thickens round us
again. It is not with the blindfold sense of sleep that we shall ever
find out the secret of life, I fancy, either in the dreams which seem
personal to us each one, or those universal dreams which we apparently
share with the whole race. Of the race-dream, as I may call it, there
is one hardly less common than that dream of going about insufficiently
clad, which I have already mentioned, and that is the dream of suddenly
falling from some height, and waking with a start. The experience
before the start is extremely dim, and latterly I have condensed this
dread almost as much as the preliminary passages of my burglar-dream.
I am aware of nothing but an instant of danger, and then comes the jar
or jolt that wakens me. Upon the whole, I find this a great saving of
emotion, and I do not know but there is a tendency, as I grow older,
to shorten up the detail of what may be styled the conventional dream,
the dream which we have so often that it is like a story read before.
Indeed, the plots of dreams are not much more varied than the plots of
romantic novels, which are notoriously stale and hackneyed. It would
be interesting, and possibly important, if some observer would note
the recurrence of this sort of dreams, and classify their varieties.
I think we should all be astonished to find how few and slight the
variations were.