And the man dreams but what the boy believ’d.
Sometimes we but rehearse a former play,
The night restores our actions done by day.”
Ev. Yet do not associate this brilliancy of infantine reminiscence with vigour of the thought. The brain in children is, as it were, like wax, easily impressible. And remember, the ideas of children are more resembling the imperfect associations of our dreams; the tutorage of our advancing mind fills it with more serious and rational images characterized by judgment.
The first impressions of childhood are bright as fancy; so that we think in waking more of things present. But, in dreams of things long agone there is, in fact, no complete oblivion, in a healthy mind, for any one of our infantile impressions may chance to be brought to us in our dream.
But if impression be intense, it may assimilate that of childhood, and become as permanent. My friend, Dr. Uwins, told me of a patient who, in a joke, once amused himself by throwing stones at the gibbeted pirates on the bank of the Thames. An epileptic tendency succeeded; and ever after this, his dreams were of gibbets and chains, and to that degree, that his judgment and philosophy were powerless in controlling his fears.
And in the book of the Prussian, Greding, we read of J. C. V., a youth, who, in his eighth year, had been attacked by a dog. His future, and, indeed, nightly dreams, were of this creature, and these so intense, as to reduce his health to a very low degree.
Now it is easy to believe the period of slumber so limited, that the subject of reflection shall not have disappeared, that the thought had scarcely time to cool:
“Lateat scintillula forsan.”
Thus Moses Mendelssohn had all the sounds, heard during the day, reverberating in his slumbering mind.