Part 38

CAST. Coleridge, I believe, was so impressed with his own dreaming compositions, that he said, “the dullest wight might be a Shakspere in his dreams.” What may he deserve for such presumption?

EV. Coleridge was an opium-eater, and the whole intellectual life of this mighty metaphysician was a dream. And you may forget that Coleridge was already a poet, and reasons thus from impressions in his own visions, during the elysium of his anodyne. But the contrasted feelings of Coleridge’s nights at once confirm the monomania of his dreaming; and if you read his “Pains of Sleep,” Castaly, you will not deem them a slight penalty, even for his libel on your sweet Shakspere.

But the conclusions of three sage grave men on this subject will impress your belief more than mine. The mentor of Rasselas, Johnson himself, speaks by the lips of Imlac.—

“All power of Fancy over Reason is a degree of insanity. By degrees, the reign of Fancy is confirmed; she grows first imperious, and in time despotic. Then fictions begin to operate as realities, false opinions fasten upon the mind, and life passes in dreams of rapture, or of anguish.”

And so convinced was the learned Boërhave of this, that he even held imagination and judgment to have different localities, because this influenced the mind asleep, and that, awake.

And why, Astrophel, dream we of strange things? Because we cannot compare illusion with reality. So we may reverse the doctrine of Pyrrho (who doubted his own existence), and imagine ourselves possessed of ubiquity. We may fancy we are both old and young at the same moment, nay, that we are and are not; possess the hundred eyes of Argus, or the hundred arms of Briareus; that Zoroaster, and Virgil, and Shakspere, and ourselves, are co-existent. Indeed, our thoughts and actions are all modelled on a principle of paradox,—as wild even as the visions in the “Confessions of an Opium-Eater.”

Then turn to the words of Marmontel, which identify the wanderings of a dream with the flitting fancies of a mind prostrate from the effect of disorder. These words were written under extreme indisposition:—

“I was reduced so low, that I could read nothing but the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments; and it is extraordinary that often, while every other faculty, judgment, the will, association, perfection, even the memory itself, is in a state of almost total re-action, this volatile thing, imagination, should be the most robust and active; it seems to rejoice at the release from companionship with its fellows, and darts off on seraph-wings, rambles through all space, visits all places, turning, and tossing, and jostling all things in its progress, or conjoining them in the most grotesque shapes. The imagination in madmen is often of this description; and there may be

“A pleasure in madness, that none but madmen know.”

Then we may dream ourselves to be others,—an ideal transmigration; this is error. We wake to a sense of our own reality; this is truth.

CAST. Yet this truth may be often withheld by potent impression, as in the illusion of Rip Van Winkle, and the trances of Nourjahad. I believe the waking mind of Caspar Hauser knew not the difference between dream and reality; he related his dream as fact.

EV. If there were ever such a being as Caspar Hauser, his life was a dream; for, without the culture of his mind, he would be reasonless.

ANACHRONISM AND COINCIDENCE OF DREAMS.

“Rom. I dreamt a dream to night. Merc. And so did I. Rom. Well, what was yours? Merc. That dreamers often lie.” ROMEO AND JULIET.

ASTR. Then we are to learn that the mind is ever imperfect in a dream. But, Evelyn, is not that rather perfection, which magnifies space and time a million-fold, completing the labours of years in a second? The time occupied with the dream must be limited, often far short of the seeming duration of a scene. Like the wonderful velocity of atoms of light, the crude and heterogeneous ideas succeed each other with incalculable rapidity. We appear to have travelled over a series of miles, or to have existed for a series of years, during a very minute portion of the night,—how minute it is perhaps impossible to determine. I believe it is the Opium-Eater, still, who thus confesses:—“I sometimes seemed to have lived for seventy or a hundred years, in one night; nay, sometimes, had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or however of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience.”

This may be, as your smile implies, the dream of opium madness; but let this dream of Lavalette, also, prove some truth in my illustration.

The count, during his confinement, had a frightful dream, which he thus relates: “One night, while I was asleep, the clock of the Palais de Justice struck twelve, and awoke me. I heard the gate open to relieve the sentry, but I fell asleep again immediately. In this sleep I dreamed that I was standing in the Rue St. Honoré, at the corner of the Rue de l’Echelle. A melancholy darkness spread around me; all was still. Nevertheless a low and uncertain sound soon arose. All of a sudden I perceived, at the bottom of the street, and advancing towards me, a troop of cavalry; the men and horses, however, all flayed. The men held torches in their hands, the flames of which illumined faces without skin, and with bloody muscles. Their hollow eyes rolled fearfully in their large sockets; their mouths opened from ear to ear, and helmets of hanging flesh covered their hideous heads. The horses dragged along their own skins in the kennels, which overflowed with blood on both sides. Pale and dishevelled women appeared and disappeared alternately at the windows in dismal silence; low inarticulate groans filled the air, and I remained in the street alone, petrified with horror and deprived of strength sufficient to seek my safety by flight. This horrible troop continued passing in rapid gallop, and casting frightful looks on me. Their march, I thought, continued for five hours, and they were followed by an immense number of artillery waggons, full of bleeding corpses, whose limbs still quivered. A disgusting smell of blood and bitumen almost choked me. At length the iron gate of the prison, shutting with great force, awoke me again. I made my repeater strike,—it was no more than midnight, so that the horrible phantasmagoria had lasted no more than ten minutes; that is to say, the time necessary for relieving the sentry and shutting the gate. The cold was severe and the watchword short. The next day the turnkey confirmed my calculations. I nevertheless do not remember one single event in my life, the duration of which I have been able more exactly to calculate.”

CAST. You are modest, Astrophel. Think of the wonders of fairyland. Our dainty Ariel will “place a girdle round the world in forty minutes.” And, even more wonderful still, I have read, in the “Arabian Tales,” of a monarch who immersed his head in a water bucket, and imagined he had in one minute traversed a space of infinite extent; and (though perchance I should crave pardon for any thing Evelyn may term an imputed miracle, or imposture, yet) for a moment listen to that exquisite passage in the “Spectator,” which Addison pretends to have gathered from the Koran, although I believe there is in that book no such story. “The angel Gabriel took Mahomet out of his bed one morning to give him a sight of all things in the seven heavens, in paradise, and in hell, which the prophet took a distinct view of, and after having held ninety thousand conferences with God, was brought back again to his bed. All this was transacted in so small a space of time that Mahomet, at his return, found his bed still warm, and took up an earthen pitcher, which was thrown down at the very instant that the angel Gabriel carried him away, before the water was all spilt.”

EV. If all the circumstances of these dreams were rational, I might agree with you, Astrophel; but the ideas are irrational which so far outstrip the facts of our experience; except in their estimation who, like the Hibernian, would value their watch because it went faster than the sun. Now the extent of velocity in the ideas of insane minds is equally extreme; and, when these anachronisms occur in dreams, the ideas are, I believe, ever false. Deeply interesting, however, are tales of such curiosities of dreaming, as those which the two Scottish physicians, Abercrombie and Gregory, have recorded.

“A gentleman dreamed that he had enlisted as a soldier; that he had joined his regiment; that he had deserted; was apprehended and carried back to his regiment: that he was tried by the court-martial, condemned to be shot, and was led out for execution. At the moment of the completion of these ceremonies, the guns of the platoon were fired, and at the report he awoke. It was clear that a loud noise, in the adjoining room, had both produced the dream and, almost at the moment, awoke the dreamer.”

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?’