Evidently I had, he thought, as was obvious in his face. But he was too cautious to say so. Instead, he manifestly did his best to placate what to him was arrant lunacy.
“Well, professor,” he faltered, “I’ve no doubt we’ve been behaving rather badly. But, you see, we—well, we simply couldn’t make out why you should want to lecture all through the examination hour!”
So that, of all things, was the explanation! I had simply lectured straight through their examination, and small wonder they took it strangely. How I had managed to make such a fool of myself, I did not know; but at once all their queer actions of the last hour were explained to me. And what a joke on me! How like the absent-minded, umbrella-carrying professor of the caricaturists—I protest I am not that kind—to have forgotten that I had set the examination for that day, had even sent a secretary into the class five minutes ahead of me to distribute the question-papers, and to have gone in then and insisted on haranguing the class, in spite of all protest, through the whole session!
And thus laughing at my exploit, I awoke. Needless to say, my amusement continued into the waking state, though it was somewhat less whole-hearted. But it was soon cut short by my jumping out of bed to put down the notes of the dream that I have here expanded.
I fear it is not a very interesting dream in itself, but that I did not promise. Surely it is one that answers the description given at the outset, and illustrates the species somewhat elaborately. Can any one imagine a person when awake making up such a story, planning so many details of it so carefully, without an inkling in his mind of the explanation that was to come to clear up all the mystery in the end? I do not believe so. But if not, how can one do in a dream a thing so impossible in a wakeful state? I, the dreamer, involve myself in a story in which I fabricate a series of occurrences incomprehensible to me unless I have the key that explains them, a series that nobody could well string together unless he had that key. One would say that I must have had the key in my possession as I pieced together the occurrences. Well, then, how could I be totally perplexed at those occurrences as they were happening, and how could I be astounded and provoked to laughter when I produced my own explanation of them? This is surely too much like believing that a magician will be amazed at his own trick.
Let me recount one other dream of this variety, a shorter one but possibly even more pointed. As it occurred to me some months ago, and as it comprises only an after-dinner speech, I cannot now pretend to report the words of it with literal accuracy. But that is not necessary if the reader will take my assurance that though I do not give the precise words of the speech as I heard it in the dream, I offer a version similar enough to be quite as satisfactory for the present purpose, and differing in no point of principle from the original. The very vacuity of the present version will be sufficient evidence, I hope, of my endeavor to be as faithful as possible to the original. I even feel that I must request the reader not to be disdainful of the puns that embellish the oration, since it is something other than the art of rhetoric that is here in question.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the speaker, a man who by the way is celebrated as a post-prandial artist, but who need not be blamed in person for this coruscation, “we have with us this evening a man who bears an honorable and formidable name, a name which, in at least one person who possessed it, is enrolled on the tablets of immortality. It is a bellicose name, and therefore timely enough. But it need make no one tremble, since its most illustrious possessor loved to make the world shake with laughter as well as wince before the levelled spear of his sarcasm. I will not say that our guest of the evening has all the talents of what a tipsy man might call his great ‘name-shake;’ but I will answer for it that he can himself give a good imitation of what our school-boys sometimes call the ‘music of the spears.’ However, I will ‘no be speiring,’ as the Scotch say, into their further similarities; I prefer simply to present to you, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Shakespeare.”
And then all the audience laughed, and I laughed with them. I laughed because I was taken by surprise when the name came and explained all the puns that had preceded it. Not by the slightest suspicion had I anticipated the name; on the contrary, I had been genuinely puzzled by the queer locutions introductory to it, for I did not even realize that they were puns upon a name that was to be pronounced later. No doubt the puns are vapid enough (though vastly amusing in a dream) but they are also fairly elaborate, and in the dream I think they were considerably more so than in the transcript here set down from memory. The question is, how can one dream a thing of this kind? For I, the dreamer, made up all those puns, since I, of course, concocted the speech I dreamed. And either I knew the name that I was punning on, or else I did not know it. If I knew it, how could I be astonished into laughter when it came to light in the dream? And if I did not know it, how could I invent a lot of puns on it? What process of cerebration was I guilty of?
I know no answer to this question, and therefore I submit it to the public. In the literature of dreams that I have perused I have found neither a solution of the present problem nor any instance of the kind of dream here mentioned. Informally I have consulted two or three psychologists of my acquaintance, but though they have been interested in the question, they have been unable to suggest an explanation. Only one other person that I know experiences such dreams as these, and he is as much interested in them as I am; but although he is himself a bit of a psychologist, he has no answer to the question here propounded. Can any one do better?