If I come to speak of dreams concerning the dead, it must be with a
tenderness and awe that all who have had them will share with me.
Nothing is more remarkable in them than the fact that the dead, though
they are dead, yet live, and are, to our commerce with them, quite like
all other living persons. We may recognize, and they may recognize,
that they are no longer in the body, but they are as verily living as
we are. This may be merely an effect from the doctrine of immortality
which we all hold or have held, and yet I would fain believe that it
may be something like proof of it. No one really knows, or can know,
but one may at least hope, without offending science, which indeed no
longer frowns so darkly upon faith. This persistence of life in those
whom we mourn as dead, may not it be a witness of the fact that the
consciousness cannot accept the notion of death at all, and,
“Whatever crazy sorrow saith,”
that we have never truly felt them lost? Sometimes those who have died
come back in dreams as parts of a common life which seems never to have
been broken; the old circle is restored without a flaw; but whether
they do this, or whether it is acknowledged between them and us that
they have died, and are now disembodied spirits, the effect of life is
the same. Perhaps in those dreams they and we are alike disembodied
spirits, and the soul of the dreamer, which so often seems to abandon
the body to the animal, is then the conscious entity, the thing which
the dreamer feels to be himself, and is mingling with the souls of the
departed on something like the terms which shall hereafter be constant.
I think very few of those who have lost their beloved have failed to
receive some sign or message from them in dreams, and often it is
of deep and abiding consolation. It may be that this is our anguish
compelling the echo of love out of the darkness where nothing is, but
it may be that there is something there, which answers to our throe
with pity and with longing like our own. Again, no one knows, but in a
matter impossible of definite solution I will not refuse the comfort
which belief can give. Unbelief can be no gain, and belief no loss. But
those dreams are so dear, so sacred, so interwoven with the finest and
tenderest tissues of our being that one cannot speak of them freely,
or indeed more than most vaguely. It is enough to say that one has had
them, and to know that almost every one else has had them too. They
seem to be among the universal dreams, and a strange quality of them
is, that though they deal with a fact of universal doubt, they are, to
my experience at least, not nearly so fantastic or capricious as the
dreams that deal with the facts of every-day life, and with the affairs
of people still in this world.
I do not know whether it is common to dream of faces or figures strange
to our waking knowledge, but occasionally I have done this. I suppose
it is much the same kind of invention that causes the person we dream
of to say or do a thing unexpected to us. But this is rather common,
and the creation of a novel aspect, the physiognomy of a stranger, in
the person we dream of, is rather rare. In all my dreams I can recall
but one presence of the kind. I have never dreamed of any sort of
monster foreign to my knowledge, or even of any grotesque thing made
up of elements familiar to it; the grotesqueness has always been in
the motive or circumstance of the dream. I have very seldom dreamed of
animals, though once, when I was a boy, for a time after I had passed a
corn-field where there were some bundles of snakes, writhen and knotted
together in the cold of an early spring day, I had dreams infested by
like images of these loathsome reptiles. I suppose that every one has
had dreams of finding his way through unnamable filth, and of feeding
upon hideous carnage; these are clearly the punishment of gluttony, and
are the fumes of a rebellious stomach.
I have heard people say they have sometimes dreamed of a thing, and
awakened from their dream, and then fallen asleep and dreamed of the
same thing; but I believe that this is all one continuous dream; that
they did not really awaken, but only dreamed that they awakened. I
have never had any such dream, but at one time I had a recurrent
dream, which was so singular that I thought no one else had ever had
a recurrent dream till I proved that it was rather common by starting
the inquiry in the Contributors’ Club in the _Atlantic Monthly_, when
I found that great numbers of people have recurrent dreams. My own
recurrent dreams began to come during the first year of my consulate
at Venice, where I had hoped to find the same kind of poetic dimness
on the phases of American life, which I wished to treat in literature,
as the distance in time would have given. I should not wish any such
dimness now; but those were my romantic days, and I was sorely baffled
by its absence. The disappointment began to haunt my nights as well as
my days, and a dream repeated itself from week to week for a matter
of eight or ten months to one effect. I dreamed that I had gone home
to America, and that people met me and said, “Why, you have given up
your place!” and I always answered: “Certainly not; I haven’t done
at all what I mean to do there, yet. I am only here on my ten days’
leave.” I meant the ten days which a consul might take each quarter
without applying to the Department of State; and then I would reflect
how impossible it was that I should make the visit in that time. I saw
that I should be found out, and dismissed from my office and publicly
disgraced. Then, suddenly, I was not consul at Venice, and had not
been, but consul at Delhi in India; and the distress I felt would
all end in a splendid Oriental phantasmagory of elephants and native
princes, with their retinues in procession, which I suppose was mostly
out of my reading of De Quincey. This dream, with no variation that
I can recall, persisted till I broke it up by saying, in the morning
after it had recurred, that I had dreamed that dream again; and so
it began to fade away, coming less and less frequently, and at last
ceasing altogether.
I am rather proud of that dream; it is really my battle-horse among
dreams, and I think I will ride away on it.