Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851.

by Various

The influences of the day's occurrences, and the thoughts which have occupied the mind during the day, have been said to give a corresponding tone and coloring to our dreams at night. Thus the lover dreams of his mistress; the miser of his gold; the merchant of his speculations; the man of science of his discoveries. The poets of all ages and nations adopt this view. Virgil describes Dido forsaken by Æneas, wandering alone on a desert shore in pursuit of the Tyrians. Milton represents Eve relating to Adam the dreams which were very naturally the repetition of her waking thoughts. Petrarch invokes the beauty of Laura. Eloisa, separated from Abelard, is again happy in his company, even amid the "dreary wastes" and "low-browed rocks."

There can be no doubt that the dreams of many persons are very greatly influenced by the reflections and emotions they have experienced the preceding day; but this is by no means invariably the case. We have known persons whose dreams refer habitually to events which occurred to them, perhaps, twenty years ago, and upon whom recent events seem to possess no such influence. We have often been told by ladies happily and affectionately married, that while they were engaged, although their thoughts were naturally much set on their engagement, they never dreamed of their lovers. So, also, the father of a family, habitually impressed with a sense of his responsibility and affection toward his offspring, will sometimes dream often enough of his neighbor's children, but seldom or, perhaps, never, of his own. Try to dream on a given subject—resolve and fix the attention upon it—going to sleep, and no sooner are our eyelids closed, than fantastic fancy will conjure up the most opposite and incongruous imagery. We have heard this dream-problem explained by referring it to a principle of antagonism, which, waking or sleeping, may be observed in the animal economy. If a limb become fatigued by remaining too long in one position, it will be relieved by being thrown into the very opposite condition; if the eye fatigue itself by gazing intently on the disc of any bright color, and the eyelids close, the very opposite, or antagonistic color will be depicted upon the retina: in like manner, when our waking thoughts—in connection with the nerve matter, which is their material instrument—have exhausted their energy, we can easily conceive how the very opposite condition will be produced. Hence the most unconnected and preposterous train of imagery may arise from the very earnestness with which we desire a contrary effect. We dream of events which do not concern us, instead of those in which we are most deeply interested; we dream of persons to whom we are indifferent, instead of those to whom we are attached. But, in the midst of all this curious and perplexing contrariety, it is remarkable—and may be esteemed a proof of the immateriality of the mind—that we always preserve the consciousness of our own identity. No man dreams that he is a woman, or any other person than himself; we have heard of persons who have dreamed they were dead, and in a spiritual state; but the spirit was still their own—they maintained their identity. Sir Thomas Lawrence once made an interesting observation on this subject to Mrs. Butler—then Miss Fanny Kemble: he pointed out, in conversation, that he never heard of any lady who ever dreamed that she was younger than she really was. We retain in our dreams even the identity of our age. It has been said—we think by Sir Thomas Browne—that some persons of virtuous and honorable principles will commit, as they fancy, actions in their dreams which they would shudder at in their waking moments; but we can not believe that the identity of moral goodness can be so perverted in the dreaming state. We can, however, readily conceive that, when the mind is oppressed, or disturbed by the recollection of some event it dreads to dwell upon, it may be disturbed by the most terrific and ghastly images. A guilty conscience, too, will unquestionably produce restlessness, agitation, and awe-inspiring dreams. Hence Manfred, in pacing restlessly his lonely Gothic gallery at midnight, pictures to himself the terrors of sleep:

"The lamp must be replenished; even then
It will not burn so long as I must watch.
My slumbers, if I slumber, are not sleep,
But a continuance of enduring thought,
Which then I can resist not. In my heart
There is a vigil; and these eyes
But close to look within."

Contrition and remorse oppose his rest. If we remember right, it was Bishop Newton who remarked, that the sleep of innocence differed essentially from the sleep of guilt.

The assistance supposed to be sometimes furnished in sleep toward the solution of problems which puzzled the waking sense, opens up a curious subject of investigation. Cases of the kind have been recorded upon undoubted authority. Hence some philosophers, like Sir Thomas Browne and Addison, have been induced to suppose that the soul in this state is partially disengaged from the encumbrance of the body, and therefore more intelligent, which is a mere fancy—a poetical fiction. Surely it is absurd to suppose that the soul, which we invest with such high and perfect attributes, should commit such frivolous and irrational acts as these which take place so constantly in our dreams. "Methinks," observed Locke, "every drowsy nod shakes this doctrine." All we remark, is, that some of the ordinary mental faculties act in such cases with increased energy. But beyond this we can not go. We are informed by Cabains, that Franklin on several occasions mentioned to him, that he had been assisted in his dreams on the issue of many affairs in which he was engaged. So, also, Condillac, while writing his "Cours d'Etudes," states that he was frequently obliged to leave a chapter incomplete, and retire to bed: and that on waking, he found it, on more than one occasion, finished in his head. Condorcet, upon leaving his deep and complicated calculations unfinished, after having retired to rest, often found their results unfolded to him in his dreams. Voltaire assures us that he, like La Fontaine, composed verses frequently in his sleep, which he remembered on awaking. Doctor Johnson states that he once in a dream had a contest of wit with some other person, and that he was very much mortified by imagining that his opponent had the better of him. Coleridge, in a dream, composed the wild and beautiful poem of "Kubla Khan," which was suggested to him by a passage he was reading in "Purchas's Pilgrimage" when he fell asleep. On awaking he had a distinct recollection of the whole, and, taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines which have been so much admired.

One of the most striking circumstances connected with the human mind is the extreme lightning-like rapidity of its thoughts, even in our waking hours; but the transactions which appear to take place in our dreams are accomplished with still more incalculable rapidity; the relations of space, the duration of time, appear to be alike annihilated; we are transported in an instant to the most distant regions of the earth, and the events of ages are condensed into the span of a few seconds. The accidental jarring of a door, or any noise, will, at the same moment, it awakens a person, suggest the incidents of an entire dream. Hence some persons—Lord Brougham in particular—have supposed that all our dreams take place in the transition or interval between sleep and waking. A gentleman dreamt that he had enlisted as a soldier, joined his regiment, deserted, was apprehended, carried back, tried, condemned to be shot, and, at last, led out for execution. After all the usual preparations a gun was fired; he awoke with the report, and found that a noise in an adjoining room had, in the same moment, produced the dream and awakened him. The same want of any notion of the duration of time occurs, more or less, in all dreams; hence our ignorance when we awake of the length of the night. A friend of Doctor Abercrombie's dreamt that he crossed the Atlantic and spent a fortnight in America. In embarking, on his return, he fell into the sea, and, awakening with the fright, discovered he had not been ten minutes asleep. "I lately dreamed," says Dr. Macnish, "that I made a voyage—remained some days in Calcutta—returned home—then took ship for Egypt, where I visited the cataracts of the Nile, Grand Cairo, and the Pyramids; and to crown the whole, had the honor of an interview with Mehemet Ali, Cleopatra, and Alexander the Great." All this was the work of a single hour, or even a few minutes. In one of the dreams which Mr. De Quincey describes—when under the influence of opium—"The sense of Space and in the end of Time were," he states, "both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, &c., were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space swelled, and was amplified to a sense of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of Time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for seventy or one hundred years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millenium, passed in that time; or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience." One of the miracles of Mohammed appears to be illustrative of the same phenomenon. We read, in the Koran, that the angel Gabriel took Mohammed, one morning, out of his bed to give him a sight of all things in the Seven Heavens and in Paradise; and, after holding ninety thousand spiritual conferences, he was brought back again to his bed; all which was transacted in so small a space of time that Mohammed, upon his return, found his bed still warm.

Are dreams so much varied as is generally supposed? Or, taking into consideration our different mental and physical constitutions, is there not rather a remarkable sameness in them? It is certainly a very unusual circumstance to hear of any dream that does violence to the common experience of mankind. One class of dreams, which may be termed Retrospective, is of frequent occurrence. These are characterized by the revival of associations long since forgotten. The faculty of Memory appears to be preternaturally exalted; the vail is withdrawn which obscured the vista of our past life; and the minutest events of childhood pass in vivid review before us. There can be no doubt that something analogous to this occurs in drowning; when, after the alarm and struggle for life has subsided, sensations and visions supervene with indescribable rapidity. The same very remarkable phenomenon takes place also sometimes in hanging; but is by no means uniformly produced. "Of all whom I have seen restored from drowning," observes Dr. Lettsom, "I never found one who had the smallest recollection of any thing that passed under water until the time they were restored." Persons must not, therefore, be deceived by imagining that an Elysium is to be found at the bottom of a garden-well, or a canal, or a river.

But to return—it is not only the very early incidents of childhood which may thus be recalled by our dreams, but recent events, which in our waking hours had escaped the memory, are sometimes suddenly recalled. In his "Notes to Waverley," Sir Walter Scott relates the following anecdote: "A gentleman connected with a Bank in Glasgow, while employed in the occupation of cashier, was annoyed by a person, out of his turn, demanding the payment of a check for six pounds. Having paid him, but with reluctance, out of his turn, he thought no more of the transaction. At the end of the year, which was eight or nine months after, a difficulty was experienced in making the books balance, in consequence of a deficiency of six pounds. Several days and nights were exhausted in endeavors to discover the source of the error, but without success; and the discomfited and chagrined cashier retired one night to his bed, disappointed and fatigued. He fell asleep and dreamed he was at his Bank, and once again the whole scene of the annoying man and his six-pound check arose before him; and, on examination, it was discovered that the sum paid to this person had been neglected to be inserted in the book of interests, and that it exactly accounted for the error in the balance." We read of another gentleman, a solicitor, who, on one occasion, lost a very important document connected with the conveyance of some property; the most anxious search was made for it in vain; and the night preceding the day on which the parties were to meet for the final settlement the son of this gentleman then went to bed, under much anxiety and disappointment, and dreamt that, at the time when the missing paper was delivered to his father, his table was covered with papers connected with the affairs of a particular client; and there found the paper they had been in search of, which had been tied up in a parcel to which it was in no way related.

There is another class of dreams which would appear to be much more extraordinary than these of a Retrospective Character, to wit: those in which the dreamer appears to take cognizance of incidents which are occurring at a distance, which may be designated Dreams of Coincidence. In the "Memoirs of Margaret de Valois" we read, that her mother, Catherine de Medicis, when ill of the plague at Metz, saw her son, the Duc d'Anjou, at the victory of Jarnac, thrown from his horse, and the Prince de Condé dead—events which happened exactly at that moment. Dr. Macnish relates, as the most striking example he ever met with of the co-existence between a dream and a passing event, the following melancholy story: Miss M., a young lady, a native of Ross-shire, was deeply in love with an officer who accompanied Sir John Moore in the Peninsular War. The constant danger to which he was exposed had an evident effect upon her spirits. She became pale and melancholy in perpetually brooding over his fortunes; and, in spite of all that reason could do, felt a certain conviction that, when she last parted from her lover, she had parted with him forever. In a surprisingly short period her graceful form declined into all the appalling characteristics of a fatal illness, and she seemed rapidly hastening to the grave, when a dream confirmed the horrors she had long anticipated, and gave the finishing stroke to her sorrows. One night, after falling asleep, she imagined she saw her lover, pale, bloody, and wounded in the breast, enter her apartment. He drew aside the curtains of the bed, and, with a look of the utmost mildness, informed her that he had been slain in battle, desiring her, at the same time, to comfort herself, and not take his death too seriously to heart. It is needless to say what influence this vision had upon a mind so replete with woe. It withered it entirely, and the poor girl died a few days afterward, but, not without desiring her parents to note down the day of the month on which it happened, and see if it would not be confirmed, as she confidently declared it would. Her anticipation was correct, for accounts were shortly afterward received that the young man was slain at the battle of Corunna, which was fought on the very day of the night of which his betrothed had beheld the vision. It is certainly very natural to suppose that there must be some mysterious connection between such a dream and the event which appears to have simultaneously taken place—but, upon reflecting further upon the subject, we shall find that the co-existence is purely accidental. If, as Sir Walter Scott observed, any event, such as the death of the person dreamt of, chance to take place, so as to correspond with the nature and time of the apparition, the circumstance is conceived to be supernatural, although the coincidence is one which must frequently occur, since our dreams usually refer to the accomplishment of that which haunts our minds when awake, and often presage the most probable events. Such a concatenation, therefore, must often take place when it is considered "of what stuff dreams are made," and how naturally they turn upon those who occupy our mind when awake. When a soldier is exposed to death in battle; when a sailor is incurring the dangers of the sea; when a beloved wife or relative is attacked by disease, how readily our sleeping imagination rushes to the very point of alarm which, when waking, it had shuddered to anticipate. Considering the many thousands of dreams which must, night after night, pass through the imagination of individuals, the number of coincidences between the vision and the event are fewer and less remarkable than a fair calculation of chance would warrant us to expect.

In addition to these, we sometimes hear of dreams which appear to reveal the secrets of futurity; and which may be designated Prophetic Dreams—unvailing, as they are supposed to do, the destiny which awaits particular individuals. The prophetic dream of Cromwell, that he should live to be the greatest man in England, has often been referred to as an example of special revelation; but surely there can be nothing very wonderful in the occurrence—for, after all, if we could only penetrate into the thoughts, hopes, and designs which inflamed the ambition of such men as Ireton, Lambert, and the like, we should find both their waking and sleeping visions equally suggestive of self-aggrandizement. The Protector himself was not the only usurper, in those troubled times, who dreamed of being "every inch a king;" but we want the data to compute the probabilities which the laws of chance would give in favor of such a prophecy or dream being fulfilled. The prophetic dream refers generally to some event which, in the course of nature, is likely to happen: is it, then, wonderful that it should occur? It would be curious to know how often Napoleon dreamed that he was the Emperor of the civilized world, or confined as a prisoner of war; how many thrones he imagined himself to have ascended or abdicated; how often he accomplished the rebuilding of Jerusalem. A few years ago, some very cruel murders were perpetrated in Edinburgh, by men named Burke and Hare, who sold the bodies of their victims to the Anatomical Schools. We had ourselves an interview with Burke, after his condemnation, when he told us that many months before he was apprehended and convicted, he used to dream that the murders he committed had been discovered; then he imagined himself going to be executed, and his chief anxiety was, how he should comport himself on the scaffold before the assembled multitude, whose faces he beheld gazing up and fixed upon him. His dream was, in every respect, verified; but who, for an instant, would suppose there could have been any thing preternatural, or prophetic, in such a vision? For the most part, dreams of this description are supposed to portend the illness, or the time of the death, of particular individuals; and these, too, upon the simple doctrine of chance, turn out, perhaps, to be as often wrong as right. It may be true, that Lord Lyttleton died at the exact hour which he said had been predicted to him in a dream; but Voltaire outlived a similar prophecy for many years. It must, however, be conceded, that persons in ill-health may have their death expedited by believing in such fatal predictions. Tell a timorous man that he will die; and the sentence, if pronounced with sufficient solemnity, and the semblance of its fore-knowledge, will, under certain circumstances, execute itself. But, on the other hand, the self-sustaining power of the will, with a corresponding concentration of nervous energy, will sometimes triumph over the presence of disease, and for awhile ward off even the hand of death. The anecdote is told of Muley Moloch, who, being informed that his army was likely to be defeated, sprang from his sick bed in great excitement, led his men on to victory, and, on returning to his tent, lay down and almost instantly expired.