There was another gentleman who for some time, after sleeping in the damp, suffered a sense of suffocation when slumbering in a recumbent position; and a dream would then come over him, as of a skeleton which grasped him firmly by the throat. This dream became at length so distressing, that sleep was to him no blessing, but a state of torture; and he had a centinel posted by his couch, with orders to awake his master when slumber seemed to be stealing o’er him. One night, ere he was awakened, he was attacked by the skeleton, and a long and severe conflict ensued. When fully awake, he remonstrated with the watcher for allowing him to remain so long in his dream, and, to his astonishment, learned that his dream had been momentary, and that he was awoke on the instant that he had begun to slumber.
But granting your notions of dreaming perfections, Astrophel, there are, to a certain extent, even here, analogies. You forget that in our waking moments our ideas are often so fleet as to be profitless to our judgment; and why not in a dream? In the estimation of distance, with what velocity the train of reasoning passes through the mind! Ere we have formed our notions of an object, how instantaneous our reflections on all its qualities—its brilliancy of colour, its apparent magnitude, its form, &c., and the angle of inclination in regard to the axis of the eye; and our conclusions (for judgment is awake) are echoes of the truth. But in the dream is it so? No. We get the idea (as Mr. Locke has written) of time or duration by reflecting on that train of ideas which succeed each other in the mind. In waking hours the judgment clearly regulates this; but in dreams this course of reflection is impeded, and the measurement of time is imperfect and erroneous, so that it is the common characteristic of a dream, that there is no idea of time; the past and the future are equally present.
Start not, if to strengthen this my illustration, I lead you again into the mad-house; again unconsciously combine a dream with insanity, in quoting these expressions of the Rev. Robert Hall (from “Green’s Reminiscences”), in allusion to his first attack of mania. “All my imagination has been overstretched. You, with the rest of my friends, tell me that I was only seven weeks in confinement, and the date of the year corresponds, so that I am bound to believe you, but they have appeared to me like seven years. My mind was so excited, and my imagination so lively and active, that more ideas passed through my mind during those seven weeks than in any seven years of my life. Whatever I had obtained from reading or reflection was present to me.”
Ida. The apparent anachronism of such dreams, Evelyn, refers to imperfect function. Yet he will remember we are reasoning as finite beings. True, Malebranche has asserted, that “it is possible some creatures may think half an hour as long as we do a thousand years, or look upon that space of duration which we call a minute, as an hour, a week, a month, or a whole age. But in regard to the prospect of futurity, of a more perfect state, who of us can decide that this seeming illusion is not one evidence of the divine nature of mind; a remote resemblance, if I may presume so to say, of one attribute of the Creator, to whom a thousand years are as one day?”
I have learned from your own theory, Evelyn, that mind is either imperfect or passive in the dream. Does not this passive condition itself imply inspiration? For is not that, in which are produced results, while itself is inactive, under the special influence of some high power, as were the visions of the holy records?
Although I may not yield my entire belief in the fallacy of modern inspiration because it is not proved, yet I have not listened to your learning, Evelyn, without some leaning to the apparent truth of your dissertations. I might hesitate to confess myself your pupil; still, the incidents you have adduced will make me pause, ere I again blend profane arguments with the truths of holy writ. Yet I cannot yield the feeling, that the dream is an emblem, at least, of immortality.
As a beautiful illustration of such philosophy, I remember (in Fulgosius) a legend told by Saint Austin to Enodius: —
There was a physician of Carthage, who was a sceptic regarding immortality and the soul’s separate existence. It chanced one night that Genadius dreamt of a beautiful city. On the second night, the youth who had been his guide reappeared, and asked if Genadius remembered him; he answered, yes, and also his dream. ‘And where,’ said the apparition, ‘were you then lying?’ ‘In my bed, sleeping.’ ‘And if your mind’s eye, Genadius, surveyed a city, even while your body slept, may not this pure and active spirit still live, and observe, and remember, even though the body may be shapeless or decayed within its sepulchre?’
The dreams of Scripture, those “thoughts from the visions of night, when deep sleep came upon men,” were associated with the mission of an angel, or immediate communion with the Deity. For He has said, in the twelfth of Numbers, that he would “speak to his prophets in a dream:” from the first and self-interpreting dream of Abimelech, the visions interpreted by the inspired propounder Joseph, the first dream of the New Testament, the fulfilment of the Annunciation, the impressive trance of Peter, in coincidence with the visions of the centurion, even to the holy visions of the Apocalypse.
Indeed, the surpassing evidence and truth in all, but especially in the inspired interpretation of Joseph of the dream of Pharaoh, and those of the still more inspired oneirocritic, Daniel, cannot be compared with aught profane.