To adequately define dreaming must ever be a difficult, if not an impossible task. Professor Wilson, of Edinburgh, has graphically outlined peculiarities which distinguish dreams from the imaginings of wakeful hours and from the hallucinations of madness. The current of thought that rushes through the sleeper’s mind is quite free from the control of his will. Dr. Rush has called a dream a transient paroxysm of delirium, and delirium a permanent dream; but the dreamer’s intellect is withdrawn from almost all relation to external objects; while the lunatic holds communication by all his senses with the world about him. But while sleep has thus closed “the five gateways of knowledge” to the dreamer, he still hears and sees and feels and smells and tastes. An imaginative person, on visiting Niagara Falls, can afterward reproduce it graphically in memory; but his most vivid mental picture seems pale and hopelessly inaccurate when the scene is revisited. The visions of our sleep, on the contrary, are among the most vivid of our life, and where the objects have been seen before, the most accurate. “The main difference,” says Dr. Smith, “between our sleeping and waking thoughts appears to lie in this, that in the former case the perceptive faculties of the mind are active, while the reflective powers are generally asleep. Thus it is that the impressions of dreams are in themselves vivid, natural, and picturesque, occasionally gifted with an intuition beyond our ordinary powers, but strangely incongruous and often grotesque; the emotion of surprise or incredulity, or of unlikeness to the ordinary course of events, being in dreams a thing unknown.”
Of the vividness of impressions made in dreams, illustrations are plentiful. Dr. Abercrombie first told the often quoted story of the English army officer whose susceptibility was so remarkable that “his friends could produce any kind of dream they pleased by softly whispering in his ear.” On one occasion they led him, in this way, through a long quarrel, which threatened to end in bloodshed. Just as the dreamer was to meet his enemy a pistol was handed to him; he fired it off in his sleep, was awakened by the report, and repeated to his laughing friends the fancies they had whispered to him a moment before. A well authenticated case is on record of a young Englishman who, at the age of twenty-eight, through disease, lost the power of speech for four years. He dreamed that he fell into a cauldron of boiling beer, and in his agony and fright shrieked for help. Of course, he at once awoke, and from that moment the use of his tongue was fully recovered. A bottle filled with warm water, which touched the feet of Dr. James Gregory after he had fallen asleep, produced an awful vision of a bare-footed tramp over the hot crater of Mount Ætna, through clouds of sulphurous vapors, and amid spurtings of scalding lava. Because of a blister on the head of Dr. Reid, he “positively endured all the physical torture of being scalped, while dreaming that he had fallen into the hands of a party of red Indians.” A lady dreamed that a man entered her chamber, and tightly clasped her left hand in his without offering her further violence or uttering a word of explanation. She remonstrated with him in vain; she shrieked for help, but could not make herself heard; then began a desperate struggle with the imaginary stranger, which culminated in awaking the sleeper—but not in releasing her hand, which, to her great alarm, was still held as in a vise. Summoning all her will-power, she rose from her couch and crossed the room, and it was only when she attempted to light a lamp that she discovered that she was holding her own hand with the other, which had become numb by the tightness of the grasp.
Indefinite expansion of time—or, rather, a total ignoring of the limitations of time—is another peculiarity in dreaming. It has been demonstrated that a man can dream in detail the events of years, and consume in the act of dreaming only a small fraction of one minute. “I sometimes seemed to have lived for seventy or one hundred years in one night,” says De Quincy, the prince of dreamers: “nay, I sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time.” Dr. Macnish, from whose delightful essays several of these illustrations have been taken, within an hour dreamed that he made a voyage, remained some days in Calcutta, returned home, then took ship for Egypt, visited the cataracts of the Nile, Cairo, and the Pyramids; “and, to crown the whole, had the honor of an interview with Mehemet Ali, Cleopatra, and Alexander the Great!” A gentleman dreamed that he had enlisted as a soldier, performed many military duties, deserted, been apprehended, carried back, tried, condemned to be shot, and at last led out for execution. His eyes were blindfolded; after an interval of awful agony he heard the rattle of the fatal musketry, and awoke—to find that “a noise in the adjoining room had at the same moment produced the dream and awakened him.” We have, perhaps, all, though in less degree, had similar experience of the rapidity of thought in dreaming.
There is hardly any limitation to the fancy of the dreamer; he may even lose his identity, and for the nonce personate Cæsar, or Cromwell, or the King of the Cannibal Islands. It is said, however, that no man or woman ever dreamed that he or she belonged to the other sex; although the strange notion that the dreamer is a fish, or beast, or bird, is not infrequent. Usually, however, “we are somewhat more than ourselves in our dreams.” The tired school girl cries herself to sleep over some difficult arithmetical task, dreams, perhaps, that her teacher assists her, and wakens with the correct “answer” in her mind. So Condorcet successfully pursued his most intricate calculations in his dreams; and Benjamin Franklin has acknowledged his indebtedness to his midnight visions for the solution of many grave political problems which had hopelessly taxed his reason during his waking hours. An austere philosopher, who ordinarily seemed to be destitute of risibility, tells us that in one dream he could compose a whole comedy, witness its performance, relish its jests, and laugh himself awake.
But to the marvels of Dreamland there is no end. “Strange it is,” says the poetical essayist, “when regal Mab rides forth, drawn by a team of little atomies across men’s noses as they lie asleep, galloping through lovers’ brains, and over courtiers’ knees, and lawyers’ fingers, and soldiers’ necks, and ladies’ lips!” Strange, indeed, and blessed as strange. Let us thank God for our dreams. They are the great levelers of life. The cruel distinctions of wealth and blood are forgotten, and our personal disadvantages are set aside. The bashful stutterer talks with the grace and fire of Demosthenes, and the wasted invalid regains his pristine vigor. In dreams
“The child has found its mother,
And the mother finds her child,
And dear families are gathered,
That were scattered o’er the wild.”
The poor drudge who toils wearily through twelve long hours for the mere necessities of life, can at night sit on a golden throne and dispense royal favors. The ambitious soldier can fight bloodless contests, and win empires, without staining his soul with the crimes of a Napoleon.