Tempests heard in a slumber will be often associated with a dream of shipwreck; and some persons will dream of their having given pain to, or injured, others: they wake, and find some close analogy to their own sensations.
It is recorded that Cornelius Rufus dreamed that he was blind, and so indeed he awoke.
In other cases, we have the double touch, as it is termed; dreams of forcible detention occur, and the sleeper has found that he had with one hand tightly grasped the other. If this hand had been moved in sleep unconsciously, the dream, no doubt, would have been essentially changed. And thus we have all the phenomena realised, which Shakspere has referred to in the visitations of his incorrigible Mab.
Elliston was always awaked by nightmare when sleeping in a strange bed.
As in some persons, by submitting the body to certain impressions during sleep, associated dreams may be produced at pleasure; so if the body or legs hang over the side of a bed, we may instantly dream of falling from a precipice: and it is curious that, under these illusions, we awake when we are past hope and our despair is at its height: in falling, at the moment we are about to be dashed to atoms; and, in drowning, when the last bubbles are gurgling in the throat.
When we read in the Bodleian, Astrophel, I will point you to other curious experiments of this sort, by M. de Buzareingries.
Sounds also may be partly associated with the dream at waking, and with reality, when awake. Under this illusive impression, even murder has been innocently committed, on one, who waked, and stabbed his brother at the moment he was dreaming of assassins.
Cast. And so may be explained, I suppose, this funny anecdote. A young lover was drooping into a day-dream, while sitting with his brothers and sisters, and his thought had turned on the cruelty of his mistress. He was for a moment dreaming of her, when pussy, stretching her paws, scratched his leg with a claw: there was an instant association, I presume, of the wound with the lady’s cruelty, for he started and exclaimed, “Oh Arabella, don’t!”
Ev. Hippocrates quaintly alludes to the dreaming about seas and lakes as an indication of hydrothorax; and to others, as symptomatic of effusion on the brain: and it has been asserted, that gloomy dreams in fevers indicate danger. But all this is hypothesis; indeed, the delirious dreams of fever are often bright and cheerful.
The “Opium-Eater” has a strange fancy regarding his dreams of “silvery expanses of water;” “these haunted me so much, that I feared that some dropsical state or tendency of the brain, might thus be making itself objective, and the sentient organ project itself as its own object.” I hope you understand this, Astrophel—I do not.