“Songe est toujours mensonge,” says a French proverb; “Dreams go by contraries” says the English proverb,—that is, if you dream of the dead you will hear from the living. Who shall decide, where the collective wisdom of centuries is at such wide variance?
To put faith in the supposed revelations of a disordered or overheated brain seems, on the face of it, sheer absurdity, especially when we ourselves may induce dreaming merely by overindulgence in eating or drinking. Yet there are people who habitually dream when the brain is in its normal condition. This brings the question down to its simplest form, “What is a dream?” And there we halt.
That there is no end of theories concerning the measure of credit that should be given to dreams is readily accounted for. What nobody can explain every one is at liberty to have his own peculiar notions of. Perhaps the most curious thing about it is the proven fact that so many different people should dream precisely the same thing from time to time; so making it possible not only to classify and analyze dreams, but even to lay down certain interpretations, to be accepted by a multitude of believers. Of course it is easy to laugh at the incoherent fancies that flit through the debatable region we inhabit while asleep, but it is not so easy to explain why we laugh, or why we should dream of persons or events long since passed from our memories, or of other persons or events wholly unknown to us, either in the past or the present.
Without a doubt people dream just as much nowadays as they ever did. That fact being admitted, the problem for us to consider is, whether the belief in the prophetic character of dreams, held by so many peoples for so many centuries, having the unequivocal sanction, too, of Scripture authority, is really dying out, or continues to hold its old dominion over the minds of poor, fallible mankind. In order to determine this vexed question inquiry was made of several leading booksellers with the following result: Thirty or forty years ago dream books were as much a recognized feature of the book-selling trade as any other sort of literary property; consequently, they were openly exposed for sale in every bookstore, large or small. It now appears that these yellow-covered oracles of fate are still in good demand, mostly by servant girls and factory girls, and, though seldom found in the best bookstores, may be readily had of most dealers in cheap periodicals. This, certainly, would seem to be a gain in the direction of education, though not of the masses. It also appears that, as in the matter of “signs,” the female sex is more susceptible to this sort of superstition than is the male; but that by no means proves the sterner sex to be wholly free from it.
Some persons dream a great deal, others but seldom. Let one who is not much addicted to the habit have a bad dream, a frightful dream, and be he never so well poised, the phantasm can hardly fail of leaving a disquieting, perhaps a lasting, effect. Seldom, indeed, can that person shake off the feeling that the dream forbodes something of a sinister nature. In vain he racks his brain for some interpretation that may set his mind at rest, wholly forgetful of the trite adage that dreams go by contraries.
So often, indeed, do we hear the pregnant declaration, to wit: “Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men see visions,” that we have adopted it as a striking rhetorical figure of wide application. In Hamlet’s celebrated soliloquy upon the immortality of the soul, the melancholy Dane confesses to an overmastering fear of bad dreams. And once again, as if wrung from the very anguish of his sinful heart, Gloster cries out: “Oh, Catesby, I have had such horrid dreams!” And Catesby expostulates, “Shadows, my lord, below the soldiers seeming.” But Gloster thrusts aside the rebuke as he impetuously exclaims: “Now by my this day’s hopes, shadows to-night have struck more terror to the soul of Richard, than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers arm’d all in proof.”
We find that our own immediate ancestors were fully as credulous in regard to the importance of dreams, as affecting their lives and fortunes, as the ancients appear to have been. But with them it is true that Scripture warrant was accepted as all-sufficient. Just a few examples will suffice.
In the time of its disintegration, owing to the removal of some of its members to Connecticut, the church of Dorchester, Massachusetts, “did not reorganize on account of certain dreams and visions among the congregation.”
Under a certain date, Samuel Sewall sets down the fact that he has had disturbing dreams, which he, according to his wont, anxiously strives to interpret—he, of all men!—a magistrate, a councillor, and a ruler in the land. One dream was to the effect “that all my [his] children were dead except Sarah, which did distress me sorely with reflections on my omissions of duty towards them as well as breaking of the hopes I had of them.”
Shifting now the scene to half a century later, we find in the “Diary and Letters of Sarah Pierpont,” wife of the celebrated theologian, Jonathan Edwards, this letter, describing a singularly prophetic dream relative to her grandson, then an infant, Aaron Burr:—