Because it never happened that Mr. Hood in his dreams fancied himself deprived of any sense, he was greatly puzzled by this question,—
“How does a BLIND man dream?”
“I mean” says Mr. H. “a person with the opaque crystal from his birth. He is defective in that very faculty which, of all others, is most active in those night-passages, thence emphatically called Visions. He has had no acquaintance with external images; and has, therefore, none of those transparent pictures that, like the slides of a magic-lantern, pass before the mind’s eye, and are projected by the inward spiritual light upon the utter blank. His imagination must be like an imperfect kaleidoscope, totally unfurnished with those parti-coloured fragments, whereof the complete instrument makes such interminable combinations. It is difficult to conceive such a man’s dream.
“Is it, a still benighted wandering,—a pitch-dark night progress, made known to him by the consciousness of the remaining senses? Is he still pulled through the universal blank, by an invisible power, as it were, at the nether end of the string?—regaled, sometimes, with celestial voluntaries, and unknown mysterious fragrances, answering to our more romantic flights; at other times, with homely voices, and more familiar odours; here, of rank smelling cheeses, there, of pungent pickles or aromatic drugs, hinting his progress through a metropolitan street. Does he over again enjoy the grateful roundness of those substantial droppings from the invisible passenger,—palpable deposits of an abstract benevolence,—or, in his nightmares, suffer anew those painful concussions and corporeal buffetings, from that (to him) obscure evil principle, the Parish Beadle?
“This question I am happily enabled to resolve, through the information of the oldest of those blind Tobits that stand in fresco against Bunhill-wall; the same who made that notable comparison, of scarlet, to the sound of a trumpet. As I understood him, harmony, with the gravel-blind, is prismatic as well as chromatic. To use his own illustration, a wall-eyed man has a palette in his ear as well as in his mouth. Some stone-blinds, indeed, dull dogs without any ear for colour, profess to distinguish the different hues and shades by the touch; but that, he said, was a slovenly, uncertain method, and in the chief article, of paintings, not allowed to be exercised.
“On my expressing some natural surprise at the aptitude of his celebrated comparison,—a miraculous close likening, to my mind, of the known to the unknown,—he told me, the instance was nothing, for the least discriminative among them could distinguish the scarlet colour of the mail guards’ liveries, by the sound of their horns: but there were others, so acute their faculty! that they could tell the very features and complexion of their relatives and familiars, by the mere tone of their voices. I was much gratified with this explanation; for I confess, hitherto, I was always extremely puzzled by that narrative in the ‘Tatler,’ of a young gentleman’s behaviour after the operation of couching, and especially at the wonderful promptness with which he distinguished his father from his mother,—his mistress from her maid. But it appears, that the blind are not so blind as they have been esteemed in the vulgar notion. What they cannot get one way they obtain in another: they, in fact, realize what the author of Hudibras has ridiculed as a fiction, for they set up
————communities of senses,
To chop and change intelligences,
As Rosicrucian Virtuosis
Can see with ears—and hear with noses.”
Never having tried opium, and therefore without experience of “such magnificent visions” as are described by its eloquent historian, “I have never,” says Mr. Hood, “been buried for ages under pyramids; and yet, methinks, have suffered agonies as intense as his could be, from the common-place inflictions. For example, a night spent in the counting of interminable numbers,—an inquisitorial penance,—everlasting tedium,—the mind’s treadmill.”
That “the innocent—sleep,” is an exceptionable position. What happy man, with a happy wife by his side, and the first, sweet, restless plague and pledge of their happiness by hers, has not been awakened to a sense of his felicity, by a weak, yet shrill and spirit-stirring “la-a, la-a, la-a, la-a, la-a-a, la-a-a—a,” of some secret sorrow, “for ever telling, yet untold.”