IV
The dreams of children are more real, vivid, fearful than of adults, because their brain is excessively impressionable, as is shown by the fact that things seen in childhood are indelibly impressed on the memory, and because their life is made up of emotions, while their weakness renders them more timorous, exaggerates every danger, and makes every enemy appear disproportionately superior to them in strength.
Emotions and fright may become so great in dreams that some children have had actual epileptic fits in consequence, as has recently been proved by Prof. Nothnagel.
In adults dreams seem sometimes so vividly real, that they resemble delirious paroxysms. What terrible events have taken place, what catastrophes at which we shudder, recognising the fragility of the human mind and the awful power of dreams!
I quote a single case which took place in Glasgow in 1878.
A man, twenty-four years old, of the name of Fraser, rose suddenly during the night, took his child and hurled it against the wall, shattering its skull. The screams of his wife awakened him, when, to his horror, he found that he had killed his son whom he had thought to save from a wild animal which he had seen enter the room and spring on to the child’s bed to devour it. Fraser gave himself up to justice at once and was set at liberty, because it was evident that he had acted unconsciously.
He was a workman, pale, of a nervous temperament, sluggish intellect, and rather childish, but industrious at his work. His mother had suffered all her life from epileptic attacks, eventually dying in a fit of this kind. His father, too, was epileptic. His maternal aunt and her children were insane; his sister died, as a child, in convulsions. From his infancy he had been the victim of terrifying dreams, in which he used to spring, screaming, out of bed. These dreams troubled him especially when he had suffered any emotion during the day. He had once saved his little sister from falling into the water, and this had made such an impression on him that he often rose during the night, called loudly to his sister, and clasped her in his arms as though to keep her from falling. Sometimes he would awake, sometimes go back to bed, still sleeping, and in the morning would feel depressed without remembering anything. After his marriage in 1875 the attacks assumed a different character.
He was pursued by terrible dreams, and used to spring out of bed screaming 'Fire!’ or that his son was in convulsions, or that a wild animal had got into the room, which he would then try to find and hit with anything which fell into his hands. Several times he had seized his wife, his father, and a friend who lived with him, by the throat, nearly strangling them in the belief that he had caught the wild animal. In these attacks his eyes were wide-open and full of expression, and he saw all objects, although he was blind to everything which did not agree with his mental illusions. It was in one of these attacks that he killed his son.
And he was an affectionate father! The mind shudders at the thought of his unspeakable grief when consciousness returned.