§ V.
BARBARIC BELIEF IN THE REALITY OF DREAMS.
The confusion in the barbaric mind between the objective and the subjective, and between the name and the person or thing, which has been illustrated in the foregoing pages, will enable us to see more clearly how the like confusion must enter into the interpretation of such occult and compound phenomena as dreams, and all their kind.
They supply the conditions for exciting and sustaining that feeling of mystery which attends man’s endeavour to get at the meaning of his surroundings. The phantasies which have defiled through the brain in coherent order, or danced in mazy whirl about its sinuous passages when complete sleep was lacking, leave their footprints on the memory, and they are strong of head and heart, true pepticians, like the countryman cited by Carlyle, who, “for his part, had no system,” whose composure on awaking is not affected by the harmonious or discordant, the pleasant or disagreeable, illusions which have made up their dreams. In the felicitous words of Lucretius, “When sleep has chained down our limbs in sweet slumber, and the whole body is sunk in profound repose, yet then we seem to ourselves to be awake and to be moving our limbs, and amid the thick darkness of night we think we see the sun and the daylight; and though in a confined room, we seem to be passing to new climates, seas, rivers, mountains, and to be crossing plains on foot, and to hear voices, though the austere silence of night prevails all round, and to be uttering speech, though quite silent. Many are the other things of this marvellous sort we see, which all seek to shake, as it were, the credit of the senses: quite in vain, since the greatest part of these cases cheat us on account of the mental suppositions which we add of ourselves, taking those things as seen which have not been seen by the senses. For nothing is harder than to separate manifest facts from doubtful, which the mind without hesitation adds on of itself.”[68]
While for us dreams fill an empty moment in the telling, albeit now and again nurturing such remains of superstition as cling to the majority of people, they are to the untrained intelligence, unable to distinguish fact from fiction, or to follow any sequence of ideas, as solid as the experiences of waking moments. As a Zulu, well expressing the limits of savage thought, said to Bishop Callaway, “Our knowledge does not urge us to search out the roots of it, we do not try to see them, if any one thinks ever so little, he soon gives it up, and passes on to what he sees with his eyes; and he does not understand the real state of even what he sees.” Nor does his language clear the confusion within when he tells what he has seen and heard and felt, where he has been and what he has done, for the speech cannot transcend the thought, and therefore can represent neither to himself nor to his hearers the difference between the illusions of the night and the realities of the day. The dead relatives and friends who appear in dreams and live their old life, with whom he joins in the battle, the chase, and the feast, the foes with whom he struggles, the wild beasts from whom he flees, or in whose clutches he feels himself, and with shrieks awakens his squaw, the long distances he travels to sunnier climes lit by a light that never was on land or sea, are all real, and no “baseless fabric of a vision.” That now and again he should have walked in his sleep would confirm the seeming reality; still more so would the intensified form of dreaming called “nightmare,”[69] when hideous spectres sit upon the breast, stopping breath and paralysing motion, and to which is largely due the creation of the vast army of nocturnal demons that fill the folk-lore of the world, and that, under infinite variety of repellent form, have had place in the hierarchy of religions.
Dreams are in the main referred by the savage either to the entrance into him of some outside spirit, as among the Fijians, who believe that the spirit of a living man will leave the body to trouble sleeping folk, or to the real doings of himself.
When the Greenlander dreams of hunting, or fishing, or courting, he believes that the soul quits the body; the Dyaks of Borneo think that during sleep the soul sometimes remains in the body or travels far away, being endowed, whether present or absent, with conditions which in waking moments are lacking. Wherever we find a low state of mental development the like belief exists. In Mr. im Thurn’s elaborate work on the Indians of Guiana we have corroborative evidence, the more valuable because of its freshness. He tells us that the dreams which come to the Indian are to him as real as any of the events of his waking life. To him dream-acts and waking-acts differ only in one respect—namely, that the former are done only by the spirit, the latter are done by the spirit in its body. Seeing other men asleep, and afterwards hearing from them the things which they suppose themselves to have done when asleep, the Indian has no difficulty in reconciling that which he hears with the fact that the bodies of the sleepers were in his sight and motionless throughout the time of supposed action, because he never questions that the spirits, leaving the sleepers, played their part in dream-adventures. Mr. im Thurn illustrates the complete belief of the Indian in the unbroken continuity of his dream-life and waking-life by incidents which came under his own notice, and which are quoted as serving the present argument better than any theorising.
One morning when it was important to me to get away from a camp on the Essequibo River, at which I had been detained for some days by the illness of some of my Indian companions, I found that one of the invalids, a young Macusi, though better in health, was so enraged against me that he refused to stir, for he declared that, with great want of consideration for his weak health, I had taken him out during the night and had made him haul the canoe up a series of difficult cataracts. Nothing could persuade him that this was but a dream, and it was some time before he was so far pacified as to throw himself sulkily into the bottom of the canoe. At that time we were all suffering from a great scarcity of food, and, hunger having its usual effect in producing vivid dreams, similar events frequently occurred. More than once the men declared in the morning that some absent man, whom they named, had come during the night, and had beaten, or otherwise maltreated them; and they insisted on much rubbing of the bruised parts of their bodies. Another instance was amusing. In the middle of one night I was awakened by an Arawak named Sam, the captain or head-man of the Indians who were with me, only to be told the bewildering words, “George speak me very bad, boss; you cut his bits!” It was some time before I could collect my senses sufficiently to remember that “bits,” or fourpenny-pieces, are the units in which, among Creoles and semi-civilised Indians, calculation of money, and consequently of wages, is made; that to cut bits means to reduce the number of bits or wages given; and to understand that Captain Sam, having dreamed that his subordinate George had spoken insolently to him, the former, with a fine sense of the dignity of his office, now insisted that the culprit should be punished in real life. One more incident, of which the same Sam was the hero, may be told for the sake of the humour, though it did not happen within my personal experience, but was told me by a friend. This friend, in whose employ Sam was at the time, told his man, as they sat round the fire one night, of the Zulu or some other African war which was then in progress, and in so doing inadvertently made frequent use of the expression, “to punish the niggers.” That night, after all in camp had been asleep for some time, they were raised by loud cries for help. Sam, who was one of the most powerful Indians I ever saw, was “punishing a nigger” who happened to be one of the party; with one hand he had firmly grasped the back of the breeches-band of the black man, and had twisted this round so tightly that the poor wretch was almost cut in two. Sam sturdily maintained that he had received orders from his master for this outrageous conduct, and on inquiry it turned out that he had dreamed this.[70]
Taking an illustration from nearer home, although from a more remote time, we have in the Scandinavian Vatnsdæla Saga a curious account of three Finns who were shut up in a hut for three nights, and ordered by Ingimund, a Norwegian chief, to visit Iceland, and inform him of the line of the country where he was to settle. Their bodies became rigid, and they sent their souls on their errand, and, on their awaking at the end of three days, gave an accurate account of the Vatnsdæl, in which Ingimund ultimately dwelt. No wonder that in mediæval times, when witches swept the air and harried the cattle, swooning and other forms of insensibility were adduced in support of the theory of soul-absence, or that we find among savages—as the Tajals of the Luzon islands—objections to waking a sleeper lest the soul happens to be out of the body. As a corollary to this belief in soul-absence, fear arises lest it be prolonged to the peril of the owner, and hence a rough and ready theory of the cause of disease is framed, for savages rarely die in their beds.