And if the dreams of the mass of mankind be so full of wonders, what must be those of the giants of intellect and passion? What exquisite sensuous delight must have thrilled the poet Coleridge during his vision of Xanadu of Kubla Khan, when the mere fragmentary strains that he then heard sung are so beautiful! How wild and spectral, how awfully magnificent, were the dreams of Albrecht Dürer, judged by the allegorical pictures in which he has attempted to reproduce them! If to read of the visions of a Bunyan or a De Quincy thrills us, what must it have been to experience them—to have floundered with Pliable in the Slough of Despond, and stood with Christian on the Delectable Mountains—to have been “grinned at, stared at, chattered at,” by thousands of alligators such as the “Opium-eater” describes, or to have with him “sunk fathoms deep in Nilotic mud.”
Physiologists have made many curious and valuable observations bearing on our subject. They have found that when a sleeper dreams, the brain swells greatly, and becomes red in color, while the brain of the dreamless sleeper is “pale, shrunken, and bloodless;” they have shown that, from physical causes, he that sleeps on his left side will have visions of fantastic incongruities, while the dreams of the slumberer who reclines on his right side will at least be logical and self-consistent; they have divided “the exciting causes of dream-images into peripheral and central stimulations”—that is, into those caused by muscular movements or positions, and by the hygienic condition of the various organs of the body, and those which originate somewhat mysteriously, in the nerve-centers.
After all, however, very little is known of the true philosophy of dreaming; and perhaps the quaint fancy of Sir Thomas Browne may not be as utterly absurd as at first it seems—that this life is but a dream, and that death will be an agreeable awaking to our real life, whose past is now forgotten only because we are now asleep.
THE HOMELIKE HOUSE.
BY SUSAN HAYES WARD.