“The two fragments which you have published separately upon pages 22 and 26 belong together, are not finger rings, and their history is as follows:
“King Kurigalzu [who reigned in Babylonia about 1300 B. C.], once sent to the temple of Bel, among other articles of agate and lapis lazuli, an inscribed votive cylinder of agate. Then we priests suddenly received the command to make for the statue of the god Ninib a pair of earrings of agate. We were in great dismay, since there was no agate at hand as raw material. In order to execute the command, there was nothing for us to do but cut the votive cylinder into three parts, making three rings, each of which contained a portion of the original inscription.
“The first two rings served as earrings for the statue of the god; the two fragments which have given you so much trouble are portions of them. If you will put the two together you will have confirmation of my words. But the third ring you have not yet found in the course of your excavations, and you never will find it.”
With this the priest disappeared, and the dream came to an end. In the morning, impressed with its coherence and vividness, Professor Hilprecht again attacked the troublesome fragments, put them together as directed, and, by making the proper guesses for the missing middle portion, readily deciphered the full inscription: “To the god Ninib, son of Bel, his lord, has Kurigalzu, pontifex of Bel, presented this.”[33]
Nor are the intellectual achievements of the subconscious during sleep confined to the solution of problems that have been vexing the upper consciousness. It has a highly original, creative power of its own. Thus the composer Tartini dreamed one night that he heard the devil playing a wonderful sonata, and, remembering it on awaking, was able to set it down on paper, and thereby put to his credit one of the finest pieces of music that bears his name. Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” was another dream composition; and, indeed, a long list of masterpieces in music, art, and literature, originating through subconscious mental action in sleep, might be drawn up.
A typical case was recently communicated to me by a well-known Pacific Coast architect, Mr. B. J. S. Cahill. He had been commissioned to design a twenty-six-story office building, to be erected in Portland, Oregon, and he determined, if possible, to plan one that would be a real contribution towards the solution of some of the most difficult problems of modern commercial architecture. For weeks Mr. Cahill labored hard to devise a building that would unite a maximum of beauty, solidity, and capacity with an abundance, and as nearly as possible an equality, of light and air for the many offices it was to contain. The structure he ultimately conceived was certainly novel, and differed conspicuously from the ordinary four-sided office building, with its inner offices lighted from a court.
His plan called for the construction of a building shaped much like a St. Andrew’s cross, or like a square with a triangle cut out of each side. In this way the need for an inner court was completely obviated, and the only poorly ventilated and dimly lighted portion of the building would be its central “core.” Here the elevators and stairs were to be located.
According to the architect’s own statement, this plan—which has been highly praised by so eminent a critic as Mr. Montgomery Schuyler—was born in his mind while he slept. One night he saw in a dream a building shaped in this fashion, and knew that his problem was solved. He tells me that on awaking he made two rough sketches of the plan in a pocket note-book—one showing the general design, the other indicating the appearance of the building when completed.
Perhaps no one has ever been more favored in this same way than that remarkable man of genius, the late Robert Louis Stevenson. The plots for many of Stevenson’s best stories—including the marvelous “Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”—came to him in dreams, as he himself has related in a delightful autobiographical essay, in which, with characteristic whimsicality, he personifies his subconscious ideas as “Brownies” and “little people.”
“This dreamer, like many other persons,” he says, “has encountered some trifling vicissitudes of fortune. When the bank begins to send letters, and the butcher to linger at the back gates, he sets to belaboring his brains after a story, for that is his readiest money winner; and behold! at once the little people begin to bestir themselves in the same quest, and labor all night long, and all night long set before him truncheons of tales upon their lighted theater. No fear of his being frightened now; the flying heart and the frozen scalp are things bygone; applause, growing applause, growing interest, growing exultation in his own cleverness—for he takes all the credit—and at last a jubilant leap to wakefulness, with the cry: ‘I have it, that’ll do!’ upon his lips; with such and similar emotions he sits at these nocturnal dreams, with such outbreaks, like Claudius in the play, he scatters the performance in the midst.