\v ^H 
 
 li:i;iiii 
 
LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 University of California. 
 
 Class 
 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
IMAGINATION IN DREAMS 
 AND THEIR STUDY 
 
IMAGINATION IN DREAMS 
 AND THEIR STUDY : BY 
 FREDERICK GREENWOOD 
 
 I 
 
 LONDON: JOHN LANE 
 
 NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO. 
 1894 
 

 EDUC. 
 PSYCH. , 
 
 mmi 
 
 Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty 
 
f ^" ' ■" i 
 
 c - . ._ 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 Two essays — one of them published in the 
 Contemporary Review^ the other in the New 
 Review — are the foundation of this h'ttle 
 book. Those papers were favoured with 
 a good deal of attention ; which I take as 
 additional evidence, in a small way, that 
 though most of us make it a point of en- 
 lightenment to speak slightingly of dreams 
 the contempt we ask credit for is rarely 
 sincere. We really know better than to 
 speak slightingly of dreams ; unless, indeed, 
 we have no experience of them or have 
 never dreamt anything but incoherent and 
 inconsequential nonsense. 
 
 In this volume the original matter re- 
 appears. But there was more to say than 
 
 ?,0G76i 
 
viii Preface 
 
 could be said within the limit of a couple 
 of review articles, and therefore, in making 
 a book of it, there has been a considerable 
 expansion of theory, suggestion, and illus- 
 tration. 
 
 It is the illustration, the dreams which 
 have been chosen to exemplify the potenti- 
 alities of mind in sleep, that will be most 
 interesting to the greater number of readers. 
 And though speculation is all very well, only 
 by such experiences as these do we learn. 
 Therefore I shall be glad if any dreamer of 
 dreams like those I have cited — that is to 
 say, dreams which are psychologically in- 
 forming, or that testify to the powers of 
 imagination in sleep — will give me the 
 benefit of what insight he has gained. 
 There is little difficulty in distinguishing 
 between dreams which have a scientific 
 interest and those that have none ; or if 
 there be any difficulty, the following pages 
 may serve to diminish it My publisher 
 will take in any communication on the 
 
Preface ix 
 
 subject that may kindly be sent ; or letters 
 may be addressed to me at the Garrick Club, 
 London. 
 
 The reader will find that some things 
 touched upon in the first essay, ' Imagina- 
 tion in Dreams,' reappear in the other one 
 on * The Study of Dreams.' But it will also 
 be seen that they are only brought on again 
 for discussion in the more appropriate place, 
 or for additional illustration. 
 
 F. G. 
 
IMAGINATION IN DREAMS 
 
IMAGINATION IN DREAMS 
 
 It is said that the imagination of man 
 cannot portray what the eye has not seen, 
 or what has not entered into the channel of 
 the senses through conversation, the reading 
 of books, the contemplation of pictures ; and 
 the assertion seems to be incontestable. If 
 a man had never seen a tree, or if the descrip- 
 tion or the pictorial representation of a tree 
 had never been conveyed to him, he could 
 not place a tree before his imagination nor his 
 imagination place a tree before him. Nobody 
 can doubt it ; and it seems to follow that 
 familiarity with one kind of tree would help 
 his fancy little or not at all to create another 
 of a distinctly different character and appear- 
 ance. In a country of oaks, where no willow 
 and no poplar had ever been seen, neither of 
 these could be known to imagination. 
 A 
 
2 hnagination in Dreams 
 
 The artist, the poet, is compelled to 
 acknowledge that the most creative fancy- 
 is incapable of creating any such thing ; and 
 that whatever his gifts of imagination may 
 be, they can supply him with nothing more 
 original than the discovery of harmonies, 
 discords, resemblances, and possible com- 
 binations between the things that every eye 
 can see and every ear can hear. It is not 
 supposed that Architecture could have con- 
 ceived its Gothic style, the most splendidly 
 imaginative of all, had there been no woods 
 and no tall avenues roofed with interlacing 
 boughs. The poet may make a thousand 
 inspiring applications of the beauty of the 
 rose and the glories of the dawn ; but when 
 Shakespeare imagined his island in writing 
 the Tempest^ even he could put nothing into 
 its fields, its air, its sky, that was not drawn 
 from actually-created things. Looking at 
 that piece of work, we may be sure that its 
 great author bent the whole force of his 
 matchless fancy upon a task of creation ; 
 but yet there is nothing in Prospero's domain 
 that answers to the first rose ever seen — no 
 invention, we need not say of natural splen- 
 
Imagination in Dreams 3 
 
 dours like the dawning light, but none that 
 matches with the fen-fire and the rushes in 
 the fen. 
 
 But it is not in art or poesy that the 
 limitations of imagination are most sharply 
 illustrated or most sorely felt, but in Religion. 
 At every movement of religious thought we 
 are conscious of indomitable, hard-set bound- 
 aries, which yet we are for ever leaping at. 
 'Thought,' however, is not the right word, 
 nor * imagination ' itself, except when it is 
 applied to the apprehension, the imagining of 
 substantial things. The difficulty of imagin- 
 ing heaven is an example of what I mean. 
 This has been a distress to thousands and 
 thousands for generations ; and the distress 
 has been greatest where the faculty to over- 
 come it (the one so sorely baffled) has been 
 strongest and greatest too. The stronger 
 the efi"ort, indeed, the more complete is the 
 sense of failure. The fainting imagination 
 has still to fall back on winged angels 
 — dove-creatures ; on white robes, golden 
 thrones, gates of pearl ; strains of music 
 which, though we need not suppose them 
 drawn from fiddles according to the frankly- 
 
4 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 acknowledged fancy of the old painters, are 
 in fact such compositions as Bach, Beethoven, 
 or some other mundane master has put into 
 your head. There is nothing more inspiring 
 to the mind of man than religious enthusiasm ; 
 its fervours are more kindling to the imagina- 
 tion than any other ; and many clear intel- 
 lects are ready to believe that the yearnings 
 of religious enthusiasm to behold in vision 
 the world beyond are sometimes rewarded. 
 But if so, nothing has been brought back 
 to earth that was not found there before. 
 Neither the religious enthusiast in his loftiest 
 ecstasy, nor the fancy of our Miltons and 
 Dantes (poets and religious at the same 
 time) has ever got many inches from the 
 ground. The limitations of imagination are 
 too strong for them — for the fiery Hebrew 
 seers, the writers of Revelation themselves ; 
 and John Martin painted his pictures in our 
 own day to illustrate the same inability. 
 
 We are to remark of this positive observa- 
 tion, however, that it is itself limited : it 
 does not extend beyond things audible and 
 visible. And perhaps we have to make dis- 
 tinctions between the waking imagination 
 
Imagination in Dreams 5 
 
 and the dream imagination. That, indeed, 
 we have certainly to do. How far the differ- 
 ences may go is the main point for discovery 
 in speculating upon dreams — the point to 
 be borne in mind constantly by whosoever 
 shall honour with his attention this farrago 
 of hints, questionings, and illustrations. 
 
 The first distinction to be marked between 
 the workings of imagination in these several 
 conditions is that the one is much more 
 feeble and restricted than the other. Every 
 effort of the waking fancy to place before 
 the mind's eye a tree different from all known 
 kinds of tree is fatally embarrassed by a 
 sense of travesty : we do not go far without 
 finding out that we are burlesquing the real 
 and not inventing a variation. Many 
 * Temptations of St. Anthony ' witness to 
 the same failure, which is equally conspicuous 
 in all similar attempts. When in writing a 
 play or a romance we picture a face to our- 
 selves, we are at once aware that it is a 
 memory, and not an original product of 
 imagination. The intention, probably, is to 
 represent a certain type of character, or more 
 often some distinct variant of a type ; but 
 
6 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 the face that rises to fancy as its embodi- 
 ment is no conjuration from abstract ideas. 
 It can always be traced to memory ; it 
 always, to our own consciousness at the 
 moment of apparition, derives from recollec- 
 tion of some individual person or some 
 picture. I say always, for there is little 
 hazard, I suppose, in assuming that this is 
 invariably the case. But as to the faces 
 seen in dreams, we are often quite confident 
 that they are not memory-pictures. 
 
 Of course it is not denied that most of 
 the faces seen in dreams steal out from some 
 recess of memory more or less remote ; and, 
 equally of course, there is nothing remark- 
 able in that. The remarkable thing is that 
 other faces do not. To be sure, absolute con- 
 fidence on this point cannot be established 
 by proof. But this can be said : we feel that 
 we never before beheld these dream-faces 
 with the same degree of certainty that we 
 feel while glancing at some striking head 
 in a crowd that we never saw it till that 
 moment ; — a degree of certainty so high on 
 many occasions that there would be no 
 difficulty in swearing to it in a court of law. 
 
hnagination in Dreams 7 
 
 Moreover (and with this remark additional 
 matter for consideration comes in), the dream- 
 face is no mere outline of shadowy and 
 meaningless feature. On the contrary, in 
 the exceptional cases with which we are 
 alone concerned, it is strongly marked by i 
 individuality of character as well as vigour*' 
 of drawing. The memory-picture presented 
 to the mind when we are awake is far less 
 vivid in both particulars ; and the difference 
 in sharpness of presentation is seen in other 
 things beside faces. Whether it be of a 
 person or a scene, the picture surrendered to 
 waking memory is never so distinct, never so 
 clearly held in view, as that which rises to 
 our minds in sleep. 
 
 But as to the originality of these sleep- 
 born visions, it is denied by the reasoning 
 which is epitomised on page i of this little 
 book. There the argument is that every 
 scene and every personage in a dream must 
 be supplied from the storehouse of memory- 
 recorded observation ; and that if their 
 non-recognition by ourselves needs to be 
 explained, we may choose between two 
 explanations. Either the dream is furnished 
 
8 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 with incidents and dramatis personce from a 
 body of impressions lodged in the brain 
 without our knowledge, or else the faculty 
 that could tell us that they are memories 
 is dormant when we slumber and takes no 
 part in dreams. The dream-face passes 
 for one that never came into the mind 
 through the waking senses, because the 
 faculty that could detect it as a memory is 
 itself asleep. 
 
 Of these explanations the second is the 
 more acceptable, though it is not the one 
 that is commonly adopted. It rests upon 
 the theory, of which more will be said by- 
 and-by, that not all our mental faculties are 
 active when we dream. Some of them, and 
 more particularly those which seem to be of 
 the governing and regulating order, are then 
 at rest ; as much as our limbs are, probably. 
 Amongst these drowsy faculties is the one 
 which has the custody of the dim population 
 of the brain called remembrances. And the 
 supposition is that while their custodian 
 slumbers, its unwatched remembrances run 
 riot at the call of imagination ; which, itself 
 awake and released from restraint, engages 
 
V 
 
 Imagination in Dreams g 
 
 them in some mad fantastic masquerade. 
 That is the theory, and it is supported by the 
 familiar fact that the most impressive dreams 
 soon begin to fade from recollection. But is 
 Memory so sleepily inattentive ? What we 
 know is that when Memory is called back to 
 service in the morning, its very first business 
 is to tell us that we have been dreaming and 
 what we have been dreaming about. Some- 
 times, indeed, it can tell but a confused story, 
 and on such occasions we may suppose its 
 observations drowsy and intermittent. But 
 on the other occasions it is perfectly clear 
 and positive : we have been dreaming of 
 certain remembered persons and certain re- 
 membered things. Do we doubt its testi- 
 mony on either head? That were impossible : 
 what, then, when this same witness assures us 
 with equal confidence that it knows nothing 
 whatever of the scene or the actors in the 
 dream — which it will sometimes do ? There 
 are times when, interrogated over and over 
 again for some face and figure that have 
 haunted our sleep-darkened minds, Memory 
 will still return the same instantaneous and 
 positive answer. So positive is it that we 
 
lo Imagination in Dreams 
 
 should rely upon its truth without hesitation 
 in a case of waking actuality, though the con- 
 sequences were to send a man to jail. Some- 
 times, indeed. Memory can adduce a special 
 reason for disowning a dream-face. Remem- 
 brance goes by singularity of expression as 
 well as singularity of form; and there are occa- 
 sions when Memory is able to declare that 
 it never witnessed in any human being the 
 peculiar revelations of character that spoke 
 from the countenance invented by some 
 power within ourselves. Which is of itself a 
 very remarkable thing. No such invention 
 is possible when we are awake and sane : yet 
 in sleep it is not uncommon. 
 
 It appears, then, that the seeming origin- 
 ality of dream-phenomena cannot be quite 
 accounted for by the second of the two 
 explanations cited above. Perhaps there is 
 more virtue in the other. The more favourite 
 theory, it enjoins us still to believe that these 
 dream-phenomena are memories cast in some 
 strange form by imagination. This they are 
 invariably, and if we do not always recognise 
 them as such it is only because there are 
 more memories in the brain than Memory 
 
Imagination iii Dreams 1 1 
 
 itself is conscious of. It is when some of 
 these furtive remembrances come forth to 
 masquerade in our drowsing minds that we 
 fancy we dream of things that never were 
 and never could be known to us. It must be 
 allowed that this is a very winning explana- 
 tion, but what does it imply? Not, be it 
 observed, that memory-impressions lie for- 
 gotten in the mind for years and then come 
 forth, for such memories are recognised as 
 soon as they reappear, and therefore do not 
 come into the question. The explanation 
 implies that Memory can be charged with 
 lasting impressions of things seen which yet 
 pass through the visual sense unnoticed and 
 unknown of it. 
 
 Though not inconceivable, this seems in- 
 credible. The reluctance to admit that there 
 can be anything wonderful or even remark- 
 able in dreams is surely carried too far when 
 a fancy like this is set up as a simple and 
 easy assumption. No doubt we look upon 
 many things with no present consciousness 
 of what lies before our view. That these un- 
 regarded things pass through the crystalline 
 medium of the eyes to the interior of the 
 
12 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 camera, and are so carried to their appro- 
 priate memory-cells in the brain, may be 
 likely enough ; and yet not as an invariable 
 experience. For since there are degrees of 
 conscious receptivity when we look about us 
 in a landscape, for example (some things 
 being taken in with a much firmer grasp of 
 sight than others), it is only reasonable to 
 imagine similar degrees of insensitiveness, 
 declining to the point of blank rejection. In- 
 deed, every man's experience tells him that 
 there is a point of insensitiveness to what his 
 eyes rest upon (it is called 'blindness' in 
 common talk) which does amount to rejec- 
 tion. Nevertheless, it may fairly be supposed 
 that everything which confronts the organ of 
 sight passes as an image to the sensatorium 
 in the brain. But whether it remains there 
 for the tenth of a moment and no more, or 
 whether it takes its place as a fixed memory, 
 surely depends upon the attention or non- 
 attention it receives on entering ; or else 
 upon the chance of its being associated at 
 the time with some other scene or incident 
 which does seize upon attention. That it 
 should sneak past attention, so to say, and 
 
Imagination in Dreams 13 
 
 go on to exist as a strong dramatic memory 
 in sleep, but not as a memory or as recognis- 
 able by memory when we are awake, seems 
 incredible. 
 
 Besides, it is to be remembered that we 
 are speaking now of dream-visions of a 
 singularly striking character, the like of 
 which could not have been looked upon in 
 real life without engaging attention. And 
 so, to go back to our unknown though 
 strongly-marked dream-faces, first there is 
 the fact that the waking mind, with the 
 whole of its faculties intent upon them, and 
 memory most of all, refuses to acknowledge 
 that they ever did pass to it through the 
 channel of the senses ; and next, judgment 
 goes on to declare that the characteristics 
 they exhibit are too striking to slip un- 
 observed through the gates of perception, 
 there to fix themselves in whatever nook 
 of memory visual perceptions find record. 
 It is reasonable to believe that such per- 
 ceptions are only recorded in memory when 
 they do arrest attention at the moment 
 they meet the sight ; and such faces as these 
 vmst have arrested attention, and could not 
 
14 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 have passed through the gates of sight un- 
 regarded. 
 
 These reasonings seem sound enough 
 where none can be absolutely demonstrative; 
 but to what conclusions do they lead ? 
 Apparently, that some dream-visions, if only 
 a few by comparison, are creations of the 
 mind ; and if so, then that the limits of ima- 
 gination which philosophy marks out, and 
 which no effort of the waking mind can 
 surmount, are overleapt in sleep. 
 
 It is possible, perhaps, to offer some direct 
 evidence in favour of those conclusions. 
 
 II, 
 
 We have spoken of dream-faces merely by 
 way of example, choosing them because they 
 are the most frequent, the most complete, 
 and to the dreamer himself the most striking 
 of what may be called the original creations 
 of dreams. It happens, however, that visions 
 of this kind sometimes present themselves to 
 us in the dark when we are awake, perfectly 
 sane, and unaware of any sort of physical 
 
hnagination in Dreams 1 5 
 
 disturbance in ourselves; and they appear 
 without any effort of imagination. 
 
 Maury, a French writer who studied 
 dreams, experimented in their production, 
 and wrote a book about them, calls these 
 visions ' hallucinations hypnogogiques.' Ac- 
 cording to him, they appear between sleep- 
 ing and waking — when we are * dropping 
 off.' They are dream-stuff, so to speak, and 
 precursors of the dreams that fill our minds 
 when we are quite asleep. Galton, too, has 
 written of these 'visions of sane persons' — 
 phantoms which have all the appearance of 
 external objects, and which are certainly not 
 produced by any exertion of either memory 
 or fancy. 
 
 In this way, Galton says, a lady used to 
 see showers of red roses which turned into a 
 flight of golden speckles or spangles ; and 
 not only were the roses presented to her 
 vision as distinctly as real flowers in broad 
 daylight might be, but she could smell their 
 perfume. The most surprising thing here is 
 the smelling of the perfume. It is the only 
 instance I remember where the organs either 
 of taste or smell were exercised and gratified 
 
1 6 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 in any manner of dreaming.^ There is no 
 such thing in my own experience, except 
 that at infrequent times of fatigue I share 
 the sensations of those who are said to have 
 discovered a rose scent flowing from and 
 about them. An evanescent but very dis- 
 tinct violet scent flushes from my hands (or 
 so I fancy), and a similar sensation may 
 have accompanied the flower-vision reported 
 by Mr. Galton. It is more to the purpose, 
 however, that both Mr. Galton and M. Maury 
 relate stories of faces seen in the dark in like 
 manner ; faces seemingly standing off upon 
 the air, and coming and going as with a will 
 and purpose of their own. These I know 
 
 ^ But as to the flowers and spangles, I know of a very 
 similar experience ; and it is not uncommon, perhaps. 
 Many times when I was a child I used to see within my 
 closed eyelids, as I lay abed in the dark, a little cloud of 
 bright golden sparks, which first became larger and more 
 scintillating, and then turned into a flock of sheep rapidly 
 running down hill into the general darkness below. A few 
 moments after the sheep had disappeared the spangles 
 would come forth again, and again the transformation 
 would ensue ; and this would be repeated a dozen times, 
 perhaps. Besides what is found in the sparks or spangles, 
 there is a certain likeness here between the roses falling (in 
 ' a shower ') and the sheep running down hill. But there 
 does not seem to be much significance in the matter. 
 
Imagination in Dreams 17 
 
 something about. It is not, perhaps, a very 
 rare experience ; but however that may be, 
 I have been familiar with such apparitions 
 for many years. 
 
 In my case, as in M. Maury's, these faces 
 usually appear in the dropping-off-to-sleep 
 time. But they also appear when I wake in 
 the night ; and the effect of their coming on 
 either occasion is to dispel the 'tween-sleep- 
 and-waking twilight and fix a critical atten- 
 tion on themselves. Yet they are never seen 
 except when the eyelids are closed, and they 
 have an apparent distance of five or six feet. 
 Though they seem living enough, they look 
 through the darkness as if traced in chalks 
 on a black ground. Colour sometimes they 
 have, but the colour is very faint. Indeed, 
 their general aspect is as if their substance 
 were of pale smoke ; and their outlines 
 waver, fade, and revive (with the effect, 
 though not the aspect, of phosphorescent 
 limnings), so that, except for the half of a 
 moment, the whole face is never clearly or 
 completely visible at one time. Always of 
 a strikingly distinctive character, these 
 visionary faces are like none that can be 
 B 
 
1 8 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 remembered as seen in life or in pictures ; 
 indeed, one of their constant and most re- 
 markable characteristics is their convincing 
 ?/;^likeness. 
 
 But M. Maury's experience seems to have 
 differed from mine in one particular, and 
 the difference is important to the whole 
 subject. In his case these phantoms nearly 
 always represented persons known to him ; 
 and the exceptions being undescribed, the 
 presumption is that Maury saw nothing in 
 them for special observation. In my case 
 there has been no recurrence of any known 
 face. As they appear one after another at 
 broken intervals of succession, I often ask 
 myself who was ever like that, or that, and I 
 find no answer except in a fancied resem- 
 blance to some historical or mythological 
 personage, They strike the view as entirely 
 strange, surprisingly original, and above all 
 intensely meaning. In all likelihood, Blake's 
 visions were some such phantoms as these, 
 presented to his eyes in broad daylight. I 
 am inclined to think so because his wonder- 
 ful, dreadful drawing, ' The Ghost of a Flea,' 
 is precisely such a transcript as I could have 
 
Imagination in Dreams 19 
 
 made by the score but for lack of his pictorial 
 skill. Under my own eyelids I have seen 
 many a face of the same awful family ; and 
 some more dreadful still, being alive and 
 astir with animation. 
 
 Yet the greater number are not of the too 
 terrible kind. They are not that, but not 
 for want of significance. For after the fact 
 that nothing foreknown or familiar ever 
 appears amongst them, the most remarkable 
 thing about these visions is that they often 
 look like the fleeting embodiment of some 
 passion or mood of the mind : usually not 
 the bettermost. Some faces expressive of 
 nobility and serenity appear, but I have 
 never seen amongst them the mask of pity, 
 or love, or any soft emotion. Grief the most 
 despairing, scorn, cunning, pride, hate, mali- 
 cious inquiry, envious or triumphant mockery 
 — no human face that ever was seen, I am 
 sure, displayed these emotions with a com- 
 parable fulness and intensity. It is not the 
 characteristic of all, but it is of some to an 
 almost appalling extent ; and if Blake did 
 see these faces, either in daylight or in dark- 
 ness, he had more than fancy-wrought obser- 
 
20 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 vation to draw upon when he depicted the 
 Passions. 
 
 And now to connect these faces in the 
 dark with what has been said before about 
 dream-faces. The apparitions of our waking 
 hours (we are at the least more awake than 
 asleep when ' les hallucinations hypnogo- 
 giques' intrude) are absolutely independent 
 of the will, and can neither be imitated nor 
 commanded by any effort of will-directed 
 imagination. This, too, Maury seems to 
 have found ; though his narrower way of 
 putting it is that will is in suspension when 
 these phantoms appear. A 'condition de 
 non-attention, de non-attention intellectu- 
 elle, est dans le principe necessaire pour la 
 production du phenomene.' If by this is 
 meant that the phenomena never appear 
 till the various faculties of the mind are 
 dissolved in drowsiness, the 'tension intel- 
 lectuelle' quite relaxed, no doubt the state- 
 ment is one which all experience would 
 describe as accurate. But, if, going further, 
 it means that the apparitions are banished 
 as soon as the mind which they have startled 
 into wakefulness is fixed upon them, M. 
 
Imagination in Dreams 2 1 
 
 Maury's observations do not accord with 
 mine. 
 
 My story would be this. You are swing- 
 ing to sleep in a pleasant half-doze — some- 
 times ; or, your body soothed in rest, you lie 
 awake thinking in an orderly absorbed way 
 of this or that, when, as a wreath of smoke 
 might arise, there before you is a face in the 
 dark.^ It is not startling, and yet however 
 far advanced you may be in a ' condition de 
 non-attention,' you are withdrawn from that 
 condition at once. Attention fully recalled 
 is fixed upon the apparition, which remains 
 long enough wavering in view to be dis- 
 tinctly seen. But if you wish to retain it 
 for contemplation (as does happen, for some- 
 times the phantom has a profoundly mean- 
 
 ^ A more accurate description would be that something 
 which for one moment looks like a smoke-wreath or cloud- 
 wreath takes form the next. And perhaps many persons 
 have noticed that when they lie with closed eyes at night in 
 a dark room, light-charged clouds seem to float between 
 eye and eyelid. The darkness in the dome of the lid is 
 much less black than the darkness without ; which does 
 not seem easy to account for. Perhaps by stored light in 
 the organ of vision : is that possible ? — or perhaps by phos- 
 phorescent currents of the brain. I do not know what the 
 oculists might say. 
 
2 2 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 ing, or appealing, or revealing look), you 
 wish and try in vain. Your will did not 
 bring it, and your will cannot hold it. Under 
 the strenuous intent grasp of your sight it will 
 change altogether after the manner of ' dis- 
 solving views,' and then fade out. When it 
 has died away, by no effort of will or ima- 
 gination can it be recalled. The endeavour 
 to recall it having failed, make an experi- 
 ment. Bend will and fancy to the produc- 
 tion of another and (necessarily) preconceived 
 image, such as the face of a child or an old 
 woman ; and even while you are in the 
 utmost stress of the attempt a completely 
 different apparition will rise to view. Where 
 you try so hard to draw from the darkness, 
 or on the darkness, a pretty childish face, 
 the mask of Rapine or Malice will come 
 forth ; in total disregard of your will, and to 
 the defeat of your imaginative powers in set 
 competition. 
 
 It appears that from this account — which 
 is founded on frequent and unvarying ex- 
 perience — the believer in spirit-worlds and 
 ghostly visitants may derive an argument 
 favourable to his own persuasion. He will 
 
hnagination ifi Dreams 23 
 
 point to the significant fact that faces only 
 are mentioned, asking why that should be ; 
 and he can say of them that they seem to 
 be wholly exterior. That they stand at a 
 distance will count with him ; that they are 
 only seen under closed eyelids will be no bar 
 to the desired inference ; and he will greatly 
 rely upon what is, indeed, a curious matter : 
 to wit, that the apparitions seem completely 
 extraneous to the mental faculties which 
 might alone be thought capable of producing 
 them. Though the mind is falling into its 
 own relaxations of slumber when the first 
 phantom appears, it is then aroused, and, 
 with all its wits in due array, becomes in- 
 stantly intent on those that follow. It could 
 do no more and no differently were it bent 
 on examining some strange creature coming 
 up from the sea. Neither is there any ques- 
 tion of insanity — any question of dormant 
 will or of imagination in disorder. For here 
 we see will and imagination employed to- 
 gether on the other side, so to speak ; as 
 when they endeavour to recall some vanished 
 phantom or strive to produce others in com- 
 petition — trying their natural forces against 
 
24 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 a power which seems alien and incompre- 
 hensible. 
 
 Keeping all belief in spirit- worlds at arm's 
 length, I prefer the simple explanation that 
 these apparitions have their origin in physical 
 disturbance. Tired or disordered eyesight 
 (yet on no occasion, for my part, has there 
 been any consciousness of either) seems to 
 be the most natural explanation ; one good 
 reason for it being that though the visions 
 cannot be called up by the will nor dismissed 
 by the same operation, they can be got rid 
 of in a flash by opening the eyelids. But 
 we have not got far when we have arrived at 
 this conclusion. That tired or disordered 
 eyesight should confuse or distort things 
 seen, that in this condition it should retain 
 under closed lids blurred visions of things 
 lately looked upon, is comprehensible 
 enough ; but not that it should be delivered 
 of images that have never found admittance 
 to mortal eye. Neither is it easy to under- 
 stand why the apparitions should be of 
 human faces only, as M. Maury also testifies 
 that they are ; though in his case they were 
 known faces, which is a great difference. 
 
hnagiiiation in Dreams 25 
 
 It will not be forgotten, of course, that 
 brains affected by alcoholic poison do deliver 
 to the organs of sight similar phantoms ; 
 and that is to some extent an enlightening 
 analogy. Having no case to make out, and 
 no other design than to enlarge and if 
 possible to clarify an interesting psycho- 
 logical inquiry, I make no difficulty of allow- 
 ing that this same enlightening analogy may 
 run to a considerable extent. But where 
 there is poisoning there is derangement ; 
 delirium tremens is derangement of a very 
 pronounced and obvious character ; and the 
 apparitions which Mr. Galton and M. Maury 
 discuss as remarkable are so because they 
 cannot be traced to anything of the kind. 
 
 Yet excitement of course there may be, 
 though entirely undiscoverable by our own 
 observant senses. Every thought comes 
 forth of a condition of nerve-excitement, 
 for that matter, and of a certainty every 
 dream. And my purpose is only to point 
 out that the phantom faces and the more 
 remarkable of those seen in dreams are 
 alike in one significant particular. They are 
 alike in this, that neither are the stored 
 
26 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 record of things seen or heard of. Memory, 
 being closely interrogated, replies that it 
 knows nothing about them ; and in neither 
 case can they be evoked by the waking 
 fancy, which works within the limitation of 
 things seen and remembered. And they 
 have this likeness although in the one case 
 they are presented to the mind in sleep, 
 when our faculties are in we know not 
 what state of disorder ; while in the other 
 case they bring themselves under the in- 
 spection of the waking faculties in full atten- 
 tion : the account which these faculties render 
 of them being that they are inexplicable as 
 products of the mind itself. According to 
 that account they are exterior to the mind, 
 which combines all its faculties to examine 
 and explain them precisely as if they be- 
 longed to the great variety of phenomena 
 presented from the world without. 
 
 If we could conceive that our physical 
 senses (not, of course, the exterior organs 
 of sense, but our senses where they reside 
 at the nerve-centres of the brain) have an 
 independent faculty of imagination, ' faces in 
 the dark ' would become more intelligible. 
 
Imagination in Dreams 27 
 
 There would still be difficulties about them, 
 but we might then say, perhaps, that the 
 visual sense having become over-excited or 
 otherwise disordered, it casts up memory- 
 impressions which are changed into some- 
 thing like creations by the magic of its own 
 special and unincumbered imaginative power. 
 And if that theory could be allowed, it might 
 also help us to understand some of the more 
 remarkable dream-visions. But before we 
 pass on again to these, ' les hallucinations 
 hypnogogiques ' must be called back to re- 
 deliver their most striking lesson. 
 
 It has been decided by the scientific that 
 dreams are entirely profitless. My sugges- 
 tion is that that is an undiscriminating mis- 
 take ; and that imagination, which is a 
 teaching faculty, reveals in dreams an 
 originality and force far beyond all that it 
 displays when we are awake. Now these 
 ' faces in the dark ' are products of imagina- 
 tion, by whatever process they are brought 
 out ; they are dream-like ; and what they 
 present they present (as I know them, at 
 least, and it is not at all likely that my 
 experience is singular) with almost intoler- 
 
28 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 able force and loaded with instruction. If at 
 this moment, for example, I wish to bring 
 before my mental view the lineaments and 
 expression of Avarice, the vision must needs 
 be made up by the recollection of one or 
 two representative persons. These memory- 
 pictures may of course be heightened by an 
 interpretative imagination if I happen to 
 possess the gift in any effective quantity ; 
 and that can give some help. But amongst 
 my * faces in the dark ' I have seen the 
 Passions themselves ; not with the faintness 
 of memory-pictures, and not as peering 
 through an obstructive mask of flesh like 
 my own and my neighbour's, but stripped, 
 and as if challenging regard in actual 
 disembodiment. No doubt this will seem 
 to many exaggerated and rhetorical lan- 
 guage. The truth is that no words and no 
 skill in using them can describe an intensity 
 of meaning which is sometimes too vivid 
 too invading, too terribly convincing to be 
 borne. 
 
 Now this is obviously a remarkable 
 achievement. In the first place it is an 
 added proof that imagination holds within 
 
Imagi7ialio}i in Dreams 29 
 
 itself a measure of pictorial strength and a 
 range of capability which are not at our 
 disposal for the work-a-day purposes of 
 mind, even when those purposes are intel- 
 lectual and divining. In the next place, it 
 exhibits the imaginative faculties in a con- 
 dition of all but absolute if not indeed of 
 perfect independence. Lastly, it appears 
 that in this condition they may be instruc- 
 tive in a very high degree, adding to our 
 perceptions what could not be otherwise 
 acquired. Taking these examples of ' faces 
 in the dark,' it is as if some loftier denizen of 
 the mind (we may fancy it a something 
 corresponding in the intellectual domain to 
 Conscience in the moral) did say, ' Your 
 conception of the Spirit of Hate is very 
 feeble — a farrago of abstract ideas, substan- 
 tiated by partial experience and by glimpses 
 of the passion here and there through a 
 variety of wrappings and disguises. You 
 shall see that spirit as it is : behold ! 
 And Envy ; look again. And Scorn, and 
 Greed, and Malignancy. And this — this is 
 Patience ; and this, Luxury ; and this, naked 
 Stupidity.' 
 
30 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 At this point it is necessary, perhaps, to 
 remind the reader of something which is 
 often omitted from the discussion of dreams, 
 — a something which certainly should not be 
 forgotten when the dreams take a ' super- 
 natural ' character. It is, that though ima- 
 gination may mislead, as electricity may 
 destroy, it is by nature the revealing quality 
 of the human mind. Revelation, the unveil- 
 ing of hidden things, is its daily business. 
 With all our thought for them, the com- 
 monest affairs of life would go in darkness 
 and confusion but for the flashing of its 
 light ; and if we look above common affairs, 
 we see that what imagination has done for 
 Science (usually under the name of 'inspira- 
 tion') goes so far beyond all that Science 
 could do for itself that Reason is quite 
 unable to explain its ways and means. By 
 general admission — as shown by the familiar 
 use of certain words and forms of language 
 — imagination, inspiration, intuition do 
 things in broad daylight that border on 
 the supernatural ; and therefore who should 
 start from the question whether the same 
 faculty may not do similar things in a more 
 
Imagination in Dreams 3 1 
 
 wonderful way when it wakes to greater 
 freedom in sleep ? 
 
 And another point may be pressed upon 
 attention before we go further. While pon- 
 dering what is written above about faces in 
 the dark, the reader probably remembered 
 the common physiological explanation of 
 such phenomena : nerve-disturbance through 
 indigestion and the like. This account of 
 them has to be admitted as possible, but 
 not without proper restriction. 
 
 The truth is that if an unwholesome supper 
 produces such phenomena, it does so only in 
 the sense that a bird singing in the air pro- 
 duced Shelley's ' Ode to a Skylark.' This 
 is not intended as a figure of speech, but as 
 a literal statement, corrective of the physio- 
 logical explanation of dreams. There was 
 a noise in the air — the bird's song. Striking 
 on the tympanum of Shelley's ear, the noise 
 was conveyed to his brain, where it started 
 certain vibrations. These vibrations acting 
 on the mind-machinery — and especially on 
 that part of it where imagination dwells — 
 moved it in a certain way ; whereby the 
 machinery threw off many beautiful images 
 
32 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 palpable to Shelley's vision, many beautiful 
 thoughts being liberated at the same time. 
 And of these he made the Ode ; and the 
 Ode is the thing. It might have been all 
 nonsense. Thousands of odes to skylarks, 
 started by the same noise, acting in the same 
 way on similar machinery, have been such 
 nonsense that nobody was ever allowed to 
 hear of them. But this one was different, 
 and is universally esteemed for what it 
 happens to be. In precisely the same way 
 an indigestible supper will create certain 
 nerve - disturbances (only from within in- 
 stead of from without), followed by agita- 
 tions at the seat of intelligence in the brain. 
 Whatever faculties are thereby aroused will 
 then become active, and there will be dream- 
 images and dramatic fancies ; but whether 
 these images and fancies and workings in 
 general are nonsense or not is determined 
 by what they are, and not by reference to 
 the exciting cause which set the machinery 
 at work to produce them. 
 
 But these matters are left for more ade- 
 quate discussion in the paper on the Study 
 of Dreams which follows this essay; these 
 
Imagination in Dreams 33 
 
 pages being chiefly taken up by exemplifica- 
 tions of dream-phenomena. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The mistake of assuming that dreams are 
 all alike, and the probability that our mental 
 faculties do work separately and independ- 
 ently when we dream, are illustrated by a 
 kind of dreaming of which two examples are 
 given from my own experience. The details 
 of both were carefully noted at the time. 
 
 I dream that I am ill in bed, and that 
 while talking to a child at my bedside I hear 
 the voice of a nurse, newly arrived, who is 
 speaking with some one in an ante-room. 
 What the woman says I cannot distinguish, 
 but am struck by the pleasant, cheerful, 
 friendly tone of her voice, and (as we often 
 do in like cases when we are awake) I fit the 
 voice with a corresponding face and figure. 
 Presently she comes to the foot of my bed ; 
 and, looking up to her, I am astonished at the 
 incongruity of the woman's whole appear- 
 ance and the voice of her. I expected to see 
 c 
 
34 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 something quite different from this tall, 
 finely-shaped, slender figure, surmounted by 
 a strange sub-sinister face, very small, very 
 pale, with ^y^s>, eyebrows, and hair all of 
 one colour — the colour of fresh gravel. Now, 
 since it was I who imagined the face, why 
 was I so much surprised at it — not expect- 
 ing it, but confidently expecting something 
 different ? 
 
 Again, I dream of being insulted in the 
 garden of an hotel. The man who insults 
 me, in a sudden fit of passion which I do 
 not understand, is wildly abusive ; but after 
 a little while, and with the gesture of a man 
 in too violent a heat to trust himself further, 
 he rushes off abruptly. Soon afterwards, 
 and while I am still lingering in the garden, 
 one of the hotel servants comes to me, and 
 I understand him to say, ' He has repented.' 
 Repented ! It strikes me (in my dream be it 
 understood) as a very unusual word for a 
 waiter to employ in such a connection ; but 
 that remark gives way to a feeling of satis- 
 faction that my abuser had become sorry for 
 his rudeness so soon. More particularly I 
 wish to know whether he is sufficiently 
 
Imagination in Dreams 35 
 
 ashamed to send an apology. So I say, 
 
 * Repented, has he? What did he say?' 
 
 * No, no,' is the answer ; * he hasn't paid it ! ' 
 meaning the bill for his entertainment, as 
 I immediately understand. 
 
 If the only point for observation here were 
 the conversation with the waiter, the dream 
 would supply plentiful matter for thought. 
 For it seems that what I myself put into the 
 man's mouth I myself mistake for something 
 different, the two phrases being easily mis- 
 taken the one for the other if indistinctly 
 heard. ' He has repented.' ' He hasn't paid 
 it.' No invention could contrive a couple of 
 sentences more likely to pass for each other 
 when addressed to the ear ; and since my 
 thoughts were running on the outrage to 
 myself, I was of course prepared to make 
 precisely this mistake. Nothing could be 
 more natural. That is to say, nothing could 
 be more natural if it were a passage in real 
 life, with two individualities to work it out 
 according to their own independent lights 
 and purposes. But then it was not. The 
 whole scene was designed and pieced to- 
 gether by one imagination : the strange 
 
36 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 thing being that the waiter's sayings were 
 the invention of the same mind which at the 
 same moment successfully invented a lapse 
 of hearing in order to misunderstand what 
 the waiter was to say. Would jumping from 
 one's own shadow be more difficult than such 
 a feat, performed by the waking faculties? 
 Or lifting oneself in a basket from the 
 ground? The task is impossible to the 
 point of absurdity ; yet in my dream it was 
 done, and done as if in ordinary course. 
 
 But this mystery is only part of a har- 
 moniously-mysterious whole : what drama- 
 tists call 'the curtain' to a well-articulated 
 little play. There is no distinguishing the 
 dream at any point from the composition of 
 a story in the mind of a novelist. But it is 
 composed (in all likelihood within the space 
 of forty seconds or thereabout) without 
 thought, without reflection, without contriv- 
 ance, or with none detectable by the con- 
 triving mind. It is only a part of the 
 mystery that I, the author of the story, put 
 into the waiter's mouth the words which I 
 mistake for something quite different till I 
 explain myself through him. It seems, too. 
 
Imagination in Dreams 2>7 
 
 that I have knowledge of an unpaid bill 
 which yet I know nothing about till I inform 
 myself by the mouth of my own creature. 
 Till then the violence of the gentleman in 
 the garden (my own contrivance) remains 
 incomprehensible to me ; but now, now it is 
 explained with the sudden eclat of an answer 
 to a puzzling riddle. The gentleman's wrath 
 was a comedy ! I laugh as it bursts upon 
 me — the author of the comedy — that he had 
 got up a * row ' in order to escape in the 
 bustle without paying his bill. A complete 
 little story unsuggested by anything that had 
 actually happened, and so coherent and 
 orderly that it could not have been better 
 designed had it been worked out by an 
 anecdote-inventor at a dinner-table. And 
 though it is a dramatic conception of my 
 own mind, I am taken into it as an unwit- 
 ting puppet of the piece ; in which capacity 
 I follow the development of the story in 
 ignorance of what will come next, and 
 wondering what it is all about. 
 
 There would be little to say of an experi- 
 ence like this, perhaps, were it singular. 
 But judging from my own very limited 
 
38 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 inquiry, it is by no means an uncommon sort 
 of dream. Another example of its kind 
 may be found among the Notes at the end 
 of this book. Others will be remembered 
 by its readers ; many more would be, no 
 doubt, but for inattention to the one remark- 
 able thing about dreams. There is no lack 
 of looking into them for what presage they 
 may seem to yield ; but should all appear- 
 ance of prophecy be absent, the dream is 
 dismissed, as a gold-finder groping in the bed 
 of a stream might fling aside treasure which 
 he had no thought of seeking. The treasure 
 in this case is knowledge of ourselves — 
 evidence of what our faculties may reach to ; 
 and therewith a lesson against haste in 
 defining the impossible and denying the 
 apparently miraculous. 
 
 To speak in less alarming detail, we may 
 safely argue from the very distinctive char- 
 acter of these dreams that sleep-phenomena 
 are subject to at least one common mistake. 
 They are discussed nearly always as if they 
 must needs have precisely the same origin, 
 and as if no explanation of them can be 
 acceptable which does not include every 
 
Imagination in Dreams 39 
 
 variety. There is no likelihood of their 
 being better understood till this error has 
 been got rid of. Dreams differ very much 
 in character as well as in significance ; 
 probably in origin too. Many are extremely 
 trivial, having trivial provocations ; and their 
 enormous preponderance in frequency is no 
 wonder and no singularity, considering that 
 four-fifths of the ever-changing movements 
 of the mind in our waking hours answer to 
 suggestions no less trivial — no less trivial 
 than a passing twinge of toothache, for 
 example, or the beating of rain on the 
 window. Crossing a room in the dusk, a 
 man stumbles over a cushion, and violently 
 kicks it aside with a flash of feeling indis- 
 tinguishable from revenge for a personal 
 affront. Turning over in bed as he lies 
 asleep, the same gentleman grinds one ankle 
 against the other, and the next moment is 
 in irons at the command of a fiendish sea- 
 captain. The motion of the mind is much 
 the same on both occasions, not less absurd 
 in the one case than in the other, and not 
 more lasting : the main if not the only 
 difference is in the strength and freedom 
 
40 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 of imagination, which is much feebler in the 
 waking state. But the poor gentleman can 
 think, can speculate, and therefore has nobler 
 moments than when he kicked the offending 
 cushion, or when, struck by the fine flavour 
 of the bacon at breakfast, his mind roams 
 away to brood over the romantic immensity 
 of Chicago pork factories ; and, in like 
 manner, his dreams o' nights are not always 
 as meaningless as that of the fiendish sea- 
 captain. Dreams differ. Some differ as 
 much from others as sheer insanity differs 
 from genius working in its most harmonious 
 moods ; and nothing will be made of them 
 so long as we stipulate for an explanation 
 applicable to all alike. 
 
 The dream above related seems also to 
 testify in favour of the theory that some of 
 our faculties take no part in the dramatic 
 visions of the night, and it speaks yet more 
 strongly for another supposition to be men- 
 tioned presently. Imagination working in 
 detachment : up to a certain point the hotel- 
 garden dream may be explained on that 
 theory, which satisfies most students more 
 fully than any other. Indeed, the whole 
 
Iviaginaiioii in Dreams 41 
 
 course and effect of that little drama seems 
 to show one set of faculties (constructive) 
 working in advance of the comprehension 
 of others. To review the story is almost 
 to see the mental faculties sundered ; a 
 loosening of their bonds of inter-union ; a 
 f^ing away from each other as it might be 
 through the lapse into rest of Will, which, as 
 it is known to us, is the laborious guide, 
 controller, and steady driving-power of them 
 all, at work when we are as unconscious of 
 its efforts as we are of the play of muscle 
 that keeps us upright. 
 
 Sensation itself gives evidence in the 
 matter. It is a familiar experience that 
 when drowsiness steals over us and we drop 
 sleep-ward, we are conscious at that moment 
 of a feeling which precisely answers to a 
 loosening of mental bonds — a grateful, restful 
 feeling, exactly corresponding with the relief 
 of ten minutes before, when the tension of 
 muscle was relaxed in lying down. And 
 what happens when we wake ? Why, then 
 we are immediately aware of another sensa- 
 tion which is just what might be expected 
 if our various faculties, slumbering for awhile 
 
42 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 in independence and apart, rushed to link 
 themselves together in their appointed 
 places. 
 
 It is evident that these sensations corrobo- 
 rate each other strongly ; and they are them- 
 selves corroborated by our knowledge of 
 day-dreaming. In day-dreaming we do not 
 sleep, but we are always conscious of drop- 
 ping into a slumberous state of mind, which 
 again is pleasant and restful, and again 
 attended by a feeling as if the tie that binds 
 our faculties in union had slackened, leaving 
 some to disport themselves in greater liberty 
 while others slumbered. The sensation is 
 the same, indeed, whether we drowse to 
 sleep or drowse into day-dreaming ; and the 
 same when we wake from sleep and when 
 we rouse ourselves from a summer-day trance 
 and say we will dream no longer. Moreover, 
 these sensations are as much to be trusted 
 as any that can be brought to the aid of 
 psychological inquiry ; and, severally and 
 together, they make strongly in favour of 
 the only plausible explanation which has yet 
 been arrived at by the most studious in- 
 vestigators of dreaming. 
 
Imagination in Dreams 43 
 
 Yet were they interrogated, its inventors 
 would have to acknowledge that this ex- 
 planation leaves much in doubt. If we 
 suppose some of our faculties suspended in 
 sleep (will slumbering, attention dormant, 
 while imagination wakes to revel in perfect 
 freedom), we certainly attain to some reason- 
 able understanding of many dreams, if not 
 of all. It is readily conceivable that under 
 such conditions imagination may be capable 
 of inventions, embellishments, distortions, 
 combinations far more original than the 
 waking sense can be spurred into producing. 
 Readily conceivable, because again we have 
 our experience of day-dreams to go upon, 
 and we know by the fantasies that arise and 
 expand in them that imagination is never so 
 liberal as when it is relieved from the sur- 
 veillance of its yoke-fellow qualities. Yet 
 when all this is said, it appears that some 
 dreams at any rate, and notably such dreams 
 as are described on a previous page, throw 
 doubt on the theory of suspended mental 
 activities. The romances invented, the images 
 called into the mind in sleep, do come under 
 the observation of the faculties which are 
 
44 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 supposed to limit and control the imagina- 
 tion when we are awake. 
 
 One recognised objection to the theory is 
 that will cannot always be suspended in 
 sleep, because we sometimes wake ourselves 
 by a deliberate effort for the reasoned pur- 
 pose of putting an end to a distressing 
 dream. Neither is the lapse of attention 
 complete. As we have already said, atten- 
 tion of some kind must be directed on these 
 visions of the night, or there could be no 
 record of them in the mind when we wake. 
 But what sort of attention it may be we do 
 not know. It is impossible to distinguish 
 between (i) the kind and degree of attention 
 under which a dream-vision was viewed, and 
 (2) the kind and degree of attention bestowed 
 on any matter of interest when we are 
 awake. Yet that it can be very close and 
 apprehensive in dreams seems manifest from 
 the fact that we wake from a bad dream 
 with all the symptoms of physical terror — 
 heart beating, limbs trembling. In most 
 cases, however, it must be in sleep an un- 
 critical attention (for attention may be fixed 
 and yet uncritical), as when it discovers 
 
hnagination in Dreams 45 
 
 nothing strange in words, deeds, transforma- 
 tions which the waking mind recognises as 
 absurd and impossible. But neither is atten- 
 tion always uncritical in sleep. It is some- 
 times brought to bear on dreams with the 
 same discrimination which it employs when 
 we are awake and in a theatre ; though 
 rarely, perhaps never, with the same close- 
 ness and continuity. But where the theory 
 of imagination at work in perfect freedom 
 becomes most difficult of acceptance is when 
 it is considered in relation to the kind of 
 dream instanced above. There all the gifts 
 necessary to the construction of a dramatic 
 sketch seem to have combined to give it a 
 coherency, a consistency, an orderly develop- 
 ment which the single detached faculty of 
 imagination seems quite incapable of sup- 
 plying. 
 
 And what are the necessary gifts ? Were 
 a dramatist asked which of his various 
 mental endowments he could do without, he 
 would probably find it difficult to name one. 
 He would say that all are wanted ; that the 
 aid of all (in varying measure) is indispens- 
 able ; and that certainly, however slight the 
 
46 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 piece, it could not be begun without will or 
 intention. But if these contributory faculties 
 helped imagination to make up the garden 
 story, how should the author be so much 
 detached from the work as to be unaware of 
 the plot of it while it was being constructed 
 in his own mind ? It is seen that observa- 
 tion, reflection, reasoning, were awake and 
 active in the dreamer's head equally with 
 imagination ; and that though those faculties 
 tried to do so, they failed to comprehend 
 what they contributed to invent or to shape. 
 It is as if Sheridan wondered while he was 
 writing his School for Scandal why on earth 
 a screen was to be placed on the stage in 
 Act III., and found out the purpose with a 
 shock of surprise when he caused the screen 
 to fall. 
 
 Yet that there is truth in the detachment 
 theory seems probable in the highest degree. 
 It is borne out by the positive, the unmis- 
 takable experiences of day-dreaming, and is 
 largely favoured by the fact that the pictures 
 made up by memory or imagination in sleep 
 are far more vivid than any that appear to 
 the waking fancy, or even in half-slumberous 
 
Imagination in Dreams 47 
 
 day-dreams. It would seem that, freed from 
 the restraint imposed on it when it has to 
 work in harness with other faculties, imagina- 
 tion becomes infinitely more active, powerful, 
 impressive. 
 
 The difference in point of distinctness 
 between the images that appear in dreams 
 and those which we call into the mind, or 
 that wander into it when we are awake, is 
 extremely great, as every one knows who is 
 possessed of an active fancy. Even when, 
 the moment after looking intently on a 
 house, a tree, a face, we close our eyes and 
 recall it to mental vision, we find the im- 
 pression faint and weak as compared with 
 similar appearances in dreams. Yet the one 
 kind of mental apparition is immediately 
 derived from actual existing things ; the 
 other (very often) has no such derivation 
 that we can recognise. Or if they be really 
 memories, they are distant memories — week 
 old, year old, dating backward by decades ; 
 and yet far more plain to the visual sense 
 within us than the fields we have just closed 
 our eyes upon. They are dim by com- 
 parison ; and equally so are the pictures 
 
48 Imagination m Dreams 
 
 which as artists, novelists, and the like, we 
 set up in our minds. They present them- 
 selves just as memory-pictures do — in the 
 same faint outline which cannot be steadied 
 and held in view without some degree of 
 effort : to every sense they are ' shadows, 
 unsubstantial things.' It is altogether dif- 
 ferent with dream-pictures. Not only do 
 they appear in much greater clearness, but it 
 is as if the actual sight of the dreamer were 
 addressed to real objects, which it looks 
 forth at. Only the eyes of the mind are 
 employed, of course ; but all the vast differ- 
 ence that we acknowledge between mental 
 and actual vision disappears, and with it 
 the sensation of looking at reflections in a 
 camera. There is no such sensation as that 
 in our dreams. 
 
 It seems from all this that imagination 
 does attain in sleep a freedom which not 
 only enables it to work with enormously 
 increased pictorial force, but develops ' crea- 
 tive' resources which the utmost urging 
 cannot bring it to reveal in waking day. 
 As for that, however, the waking imagina- 
 tion can hardly conceive itself capable of 
 
Imagination in Dreams 49 
 
 surrendering the creations of which it is 
 freely delivered in slumber. It knows its 
 comparative impotence in the one state, 
 and hesitates to believe its own powers in 
 the other. 
 
 But perhaps the minds of children offer 
 the strongest illustration of the theory that 
 dream-imagination is so powerful because 
 it operates in detachment from other quali- 
 ties — those of the criticising, suppressive, 
 disciplinary kind. In childhood there is no 
 such mutual supervision of the mental 
 faculties as there is in the adult. For in 
 the first place some of them lack develop- 
 ment — they have yet to grow. And inas- 
 much as their other faculties have come to 
 growth in children, they have yet to be 
 linked in the closer association that binds 
 them when they come to maturity. What 
 is called the ' knitting ' of our bodily frames 
 has its counterpart in the knitting of the 
 mind ; a process which is only at its begin- 
 ning in childhood. Both retrospection and 
 observation declare that at this time of life 
 our faculties work more independently of 
 each other than when we are grown up, or 
 D 
 
50 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 till we come to the second childhood of old 
 age ; and no adept can doubt that the wak- 
 ing imagination of children shows a near 
 approach to the spontaneity and vividness 
 of fancy-production in dreams. Their make- 
 believe goes far beyond all that we can 
 command. Imagination places its creations 
 and transformations before their eyes with 
 much of the objectivity with which they are 
 presented to us in sleep alone when we grow 
 older, and when our various gifts are brought 
 into more complete co-ordination. 
 
 It will be seen that these observations are 
 all to the point, and others strengthen them. 
 Briefly, the saying that ' Genius is to mad- 
 ness near allied ' imports the same idea — 
 imagination comparatively unhampered by 
 the restraint of other and more pedestrian 
 faculties. And with that consideration 
 another should be taken, for it has a strong 
 bearing on this part of the subject : It is the 
 common experience of men of genius that 
 their noblest ' thoughts,' their keenest intui- 
 tions, seem to flash into the mind from with- 
 out rather than to spring up from within. 
 They seem to proceed from some inde- 
 
Imagination in Drea^ns 51 
 
 pendent agency external to mind and yet at 
 home in it ; which is just what might be said 
 of dreams. And madness being mentioned, 
 another remark occurs. Insanity is robbed 
 of half its terrors by the extremely probable 
 supposition that the state of madness is a 
 state of constant dreaming ; and wherever 
 insanity appears it certainly seems that the 1 
 mental faculties have fallen apart from each I 
 other, and that imagination takes full pos- ^ 
 session in unbridled strength. 
 
 IV 
 
 We have here a strong array of evidence 
 for the imagination-in-detachment theory, 
 which I think will hold ; but not without 
 considerable ekings, or perhaps without 
 transformation absolute. For unless it may 
 be assumed that imagination has far more 
 tremendous powers than have ever yet been 
 allowed to it — unless, that is to say, it is 
 capable of simulating effectually, or of 
 developing in itself, nearly all the other 
 qualities of mind — this theory does not 
 
52 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 suffice to explain * proleptic ' dreams ; such 
 as the garden dream and the dream of the 
 Queen's palace, which is told in the Notes. 
 
 And now comes in another point for 
 remark. So far as we know, neither the 
 freer imagination of childhood nor the abso- 
 lutely unfettered faculty in madness is ever 
 productive of the kind of dreams which are 
 called supernatural, for want of a word more 
 accurately expressive. These are the most 
 remarkable phenomena, of sleep ; and it 
 appears that prophetic dreams, or dreams 
 which seem to import something of the 
 supernatural, only arise in sane minds. 
 Moreover, they do not appear in these till 
 the mental qualities have come to full 
 growth, and are brought into a condition of 
 close inter-dependence. But if so, then super- 
 natural dreams are eminently worthy of con- 
 sideration in any attempt to survey the scope 
 and boundary of the human mind. 
 
 Dreams which have all the character of 
 prophecy and revelation do undoubtedly 
 occur ; and it would add much to their 
 importance as mind-products were there 
 reason to believe — as there seems to be from 
 
Imagination in Dreajns 53 
 
 the observations above mentioned — that 
 they are not amongst those which are pro- 
 duced by imagination alone, and when the 
 reasoning faculties may be suspected of 
 stupefaction in sleep. At liberty to reject 
 the detachment theory so far as these dreams 
 are concerned, we may advance to another ; 
 which, though it is new (I fancy), will stand 
 examination as well as most. It is possible 
 that these dreams arise when not one but all 
 of the mental faculties are lifted into a 
 higher range of freedom, at the same time 
 maintaining their accustomed harmony. 
 That, indeed, is what men of genius would 
 say happens to them whenever their minds 
 are working at their largest and best ; 
 which is an additional reason for accepting 
 this explanation of the strangest of dream- 
 phenomena. Nor is there anything against 
 it in the fact that imagination is still domi- 
 nant : that is only what we should expect. 
 Naturally it is imagination that speaks in 
 these dreams as in others — its speech being 
 fable and picture. The wonder appears when 
 it speaks or acts as if endowed with inde- 
 pendent powers of reflection and reasoning. 
 
54 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 — powers which it brings to bear, instruc- 
 tively, on those other gifts of reflection and 
 reasoning that belong to the work-a-day 
 machinery of mind. 
 
 Since it seems necessary to illustrate this 
 more remarkable kind of dreaming, I will 
 relate one of a series of dreams which 
 followed each other at intervals of a year 
 precisely — a year to a day. 
 
 A long time ago, a gentleman who may 
 be called A. lost a child by death. He had 
 been very fond and proud of the boy, who 
 was seven or eight years old, I think, when 
 he died. Indeed, between the two there had 
 always been a strong sympathy, and when 
 the child was taken the father was plunged 
 into the deepest grief Like many another 
 in the same situation, his thoughts by day 
 and night were tortured by the question, 
 ' But yet is he still in existence ? Is there a 
 place in this vast universe where I may think 
 of him as living — no matter how infinite the 
 distance, or even if we are parted not only 
 now but for ever and ever ? ' Many poor 
 souls have been tossed about in the same 
 yearning speculations day after day, month 
 
Iinagiiiation m Drea7?is 55 
 
 after month, with no diminution of doubt and 
 pain. A. was one of the most unfortunate. 
 
 And to this great trouble was added 
 another, which took the shape of a deep 
 and surprising disappointment At first, one 
 of the poor man's very few comforts was that 
 the boy would haunt his dreams, and that 
 they would be together many a time that 
 way. But it is not invariably true that what 
 you think of most you dream of most ; and 
 for all his hoping and praying the father 
 never once dreamt of his son. He never had 
 any such dream for a whole year ; by which 
 time, I daresay, the praying had been given 
 up and the hope exhausted. But then, on 
 the morning of the anniversary of the child's 
 death, and at the very hour at which he died, 
 the father woke from a wonderful dream, so 
 intimately and touchingly responsive to the 
 whole year's grief that it cannot be thrown 
 into the glare of print. It is only mentioned, 
 together with the fact that after another twelve 
 months of blank and empty nights another 
 dream of the same character occurred at the 
 same hour, in order to give its own setting 
 to the third dream. 
 
56 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 The morning had again come round. A. 
 dreamed that he had awakened about dawn, 
 and, thinking of nothing but the hour to rise, 
 had drawn his watch from under his pillow. 
 In doing so he saw that it had been com- 
 pletely shattered. But how could it have 
 been broken so violently, lying where it 
 had been snugly placed a few hours before ? 
 A reasonable but an injurious conjecture 
 occurred to him : at some time in the night 
 the watch had been taken from beneath his 
 pillow by his wife, who had allowed it to fall. 
 Satisfied that there could be no other ex- 
 planation, he was about to drop asleep again, 
 to get rid of ill-humour at the accident (this is 
 all in the dream, be it understood), when the 
 door opened and in came a foreman of works 
 to whom A. gave instructions every day, and 
 between whom and himself there was a great 
 liking. It seemed as if the man had come for 
 the usual draft of work to be done, and it did 
 not strike A. as anything out of the way that 
 he should be visited in his bedroom for it. 
 But he was struck by the mysterious look of 
 inquiry on the man's face. The next moment 
 he connected this look with the broken 
 
Imagination in Dreams 57 
 
 watch, and drew it out again ; the glass gone, 
 the hands swept from the dial, but seeming 
 less like his own watch now. What was the 
 meaning of it ? While A. was asking him- 
 self the question in a sort of expectant trepi- 
 dation, the foreman of works said, *Put 
 it to your ear, sir,' meaning, of course, the 
 broken watch. This A. did ; and as he 
 listened to the even beat within, the other 
 said, * Sir, we know how much you are 
 troubled, and this is our way of showing you 
 that though every sign of life is destroyed 
 life may still be going on.' ^ Whereupon A. 
 woke all of a tremble, heard the tranquil 
 tick-ticking of his watch under his pillow, 
 and when he could compose himself to take 
 it forth, saw that the hands stood at within 
 five or eight minutes of the time when his 
 boy died on the same day in the calendar. 
 
 When such dreams «s these visit us (and 
 this one is told quite faithfully, without a 
 word of omission, importation, transposition, 
 
 ^ The ' we ' and the ' our ' here were understood to 
 signify that the kindly plot had been got up not by the 
 foreman alone, but in concert with those employed under 
 him. 
 
58 hnagination in Dreams 
 
 or embellishment) they make an impres- 
 sion on the mind which no reasoning can 
 efface. Anxious as we may be to assert 
 our emancipation from superstitious ideas, 
 confident as we may be that the dream is 
 and must be explicable by some morbid 
 condition of organic function or some mys- 
 terious 'association of thought,' no sooner 
 is attention withdrawn from that conclusion 
 than belief in the supernatural creeps back 
 to replace it. And as often as it is expelled 
 it will return — shadowy but inexpugnable, 
 or expugnable only for a while. It comes 
 back again and again like an exile to its 
 home, where the reasonings that chase it 
 away are as foreigners and conquerors. It 
 may be that it has no right to exist in the 
 mind at all ; but the mind itself feels that 
 the yearning to supernatural belief is more 
 truly native than the mental forces which 
 forbid it to remain. 
 
 It should be no surprise if a reasonable 
 study of the subject led to the conclusion 
 that dream-revelations are not the fiction or 
 the misinterpreted fortuity which scientific 
 men insist they are. Why may not some of 
 
Imagination in Dreams 59 
 
 them be supernatural in the sense that ima- 
 gination has a range of power far beyond 
 what is thought natural to it, or that Reason 
 can account for with comfort to itself? From 
 time immemorial the power has been felt, 
 and acknowledged as the gift of seers and 
 prophets under the name of second-sight, 
 supernatural inspiration, divine intimation. 
 It is now denied altogether ; but since any- 
 one may declare a belief in Intuition (and 
 what is that?) without being called super- 
 stitious, why may not the existence of this 
 same mysterious power under the name of 
 Imagination be allowed ? There is no super- 
 stition in that, though justice to the old 
 beliefs must concede that A.'s dream is more 
 plausibly explained by a whisper from with- 
 out than by the operation of our natural 
 faculties. How ridiculous it is to dismiss 
 such dreams as the mere consequence of 
 physical disturbance — indigestion and the 
 like — will be seen in the following essay ; 
 but neither can they be accounted for by a 
 disorganised state of mind in which the in- 
 ventive faculties have unrestricted liberty. 
 Disorder, disorganisation are forbidden words 
 
6o Imagination in Dreams 
 
 in the case of A.'s dream, where all the more 
 remarkable characteristics of the proleptic 
 dream appear in combination with others 
 still more impressive. 
 
 There again we view the mind of a man 
 creating a drama in which he himself — that 
 is to say, his whole conscious being, all that 
 he ever called ' myself — is made to play a 
 part, while yet he has to follow the develop- 
 ment of the story in ignorance of its every 
 turn. Not in idle ignorance either, but in 
 striving and baffled ignorance ; for he was 
 eagerly curious to make out the incidents of 
 the dream as they arose, and even came to 
 wrong conclusions about them at one stage 
 of their evolution, after calling upon ima- 
 gination itself to enlighten him. And these 
 
 incidents were ? His own inventions; 
 
 or, if not, whose ? 
 
 As to that particular, however, the vision 
 was no more than a strikingly illustrative 
 example of a kind of dreams which are 
 commonly meaningless, except as they 
 witness to a latent unsuspected strength 
 and facility in our mental endowments. But, 
 together with that characteristic, the dream 
 
Imagination in Dreams 6i 
 
 has others of great significance, howsoever 
 viewed. It is marked by one difference 
 which places it in a far higher region of 
 ' sleep's imaginings.' Apparently, a reasoned 
 purpose had to be achieved ; and when I say 
 'apparently' it is only in deference to the 
 all but universal feeling that there can be no 
 reasoning and no purpose in dreams. The 
 truth is that unless the ordinary processes of 
 judgment are inapplicable to dream-pheno- 
 mena, the conclusion is unavoidable that here 
 a reasoned purpose had to be achieved — as 
 much by set design as when Nathan made 
 up his parable of the ewe-lamb. And it was 
 achieved ; for the dreamer was more at 
 peace from that hour than he had been for 
 many a month before. 
 
 But the question is persistent : At peace 
 through his own persuasions, his own divina- 
 tions? Unless we yield to the supposition 
 that they were inspired from without we must 
 needs answer Yes ; accounting as best we 
 may for the persuasions being arrived at in 
 a dream and not by the set processes of 
 thought. Yet were A. asked whether the 
 design and purpose of the dream were his 
 
62 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 own he would answer that they were as 
 strange to him when they were put in opera- 
 tion as the parable was to David when 
 Nathan began to speak. Further he would 
 answer that they seemed to him, when he 
 woke, as foreign to himself and as much of a 
 surprise as the fable of the Jewish prophet 
 could have seemed to the Jewish king. And 
 yet what but A.'s own mind — which is A. 
 himself — invented the design and directed 
 the purpose ? What, indeed, but his whole 
 mind, with all its parts working together in 
 due contribution and in full accord ? 
 
 It is barely conceivable that so much con- 
 trivance — for an end, apparently, which must 
 itself have been the subject of complicated 
 feeling and thought — could be planned and 
 carried out by any single attribute of mind, 
 no matter what magic it may be capable of 
 when liberated from the control of the rest. 
 To do as much as that, imagination, the one 
 faculty to which all dreaming is referred, 
 must be capable of far more than an exten- 
 sion of its powers when in a state of detach- 
 ment. Recalling an hypothesis which was 
 flown from a previous page, we must suppose 
 
Imagination in Dreams 63 
 
 imagination able to develop in itself, on 
 occasion, nearly all the other mental faculties, 
 including will or intention : qualities, be it 
 observed, of which it is more the servant than 
 anything else while we are awake. 
 
 That imagination is capable of so much as 
 this is a fascinating conjecture, but one that 
 few will accept. It would be easier to con- 
 fide in the other theory, and believe that 
 such dreams as A.'s occur when not imagina- 
 tion alone but all the faculties of mind, re- 
 leased from the drag of the corporeal senses, 
 soar into a higher range of freedom while 
 still maintaining their natural relations in 
 full harmony. If one contributory to the 
 mind-machine can exert extraordinary 
 powers in the relaxations of sleep, may not 
 others } May they not do so sometimes — 
 by accident, on rare occasions — concordantly 
 with imagination and each other though 
 moving in a larger orbit of action ? If so, 
 much would be accounted for, and yet no 
 great wonder would be added to the wonders 
 amidst which we move from the moment we 
 begin to think of what mind is and how we 
 come by it. 
 
64 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 But there is another guess, and one that 
 puts less strain on apprehension. It is easy 
 to imagine the mind of man dual — its facul- 
 ties supplied in a double set. Duality seems 
 to be a common law in Nature. The brain, 
 which is the mind-machine, is itself a dual 
 organ ; and nearly all the difficulty of under- 
 standing dreams would disappear if we could 
 believe that our mental faculties are duplex, 
 and that though the two sets work together 
 inseparably and indistinguishably while we 
 live our natural lives in the waking world, 
 they are capable of working apart, the one 
 under the observation of the other more or 
 less, when all are out of harness by the sus- 
 pension of the senses in sleep. 
 
 On this supposition the more inexplicable 
 peculiarities of the hotel-garden dream and 
 the like would lose their mystery; and a 
 great deal of what is called the supernatural 
 in dreams would also be accounted for, per- 
 haps. But there again we enter upon dubious 
 matter. For my own part, I have no doubt 
 that dreams of warning and prevision do 
 occur, and I could speak as to some with 
 the utmost confidence. And so, I believe, 
 
Imagination in Dreams 65 
 
 could many others, were they not withheld 
 by considerations of which one at least 
 can hardly be gainsaid. It is not that who- 
 soever expresses belief or half-belief in the 
 supernatural character of dreams exposes 
 himself to ridicule, though that is reason 
 enough. No doubt, were a religion to be 
 vindicated, or any sort of gain to be got, the 
 risk of inviting attention to some dream as 
 one which no acknowledged natural agency 
 seemed capable of explaining would be 
 dared pretty often ; but what inducement is 
 there to rush into publicity and suspicion 
 with a trivial story like this that follows — 
 declaring that I think it ' very curious ' ? 
 
 I make a very early call on some familiar 
 friends. They are lingering at breakfast 
 later than seems reasonable, and one young 
 lady has not yet come down. But down 
 she comes a few minutes afterward, to be 
 jokingly reproached for laziness. She is not 
 without excuse, however, if dreaming may 
 account for late lying abed ; for she instantly 
 plunges into the relation of a dream about 
 Aunt Susan, who lives in the country, it 
 seems. ' I half expected to find her here,' 
 E 
 
66 Imagination in Drea^ns 
 
 says the young lady, * my dream was so 
 plain and everything just as it would be.' 
 Aunt's boxes outside the cab as she drove 
 up are then described, and the abundance of 
 small parcels inside the cab, every one of 
 them to be handled with special care ; * and 
 it was so funny to see her turning the things 
 out of her reticule the moment she came in, 
 strewing them all over the table ; her hand- 
 kerchief, and her smelling-salts, and her 
 purse, and — yes ! — a paper-bag with crumbs ; 
 and a nice scatter they made ! ' And so 
 forth, and so forth. Ten minutes afterwards 
 a cab with luggage on the roof drives up to 
 the door ; and I myself see Aunt Susan 
 enter the room, carrying a large old-fashioned 
 ' reticule ' bursting with small sundries, of 
 which a paper that might have been a con- 
 fectioner's bag was evidently one. 
 
 Is it worth while to tell of trivial and 
 pointless dreams like this out of the family 
 circle, or even to tell them there as if they 
 offered matter for serious consideration .? To 
 be sure, had the visitor foreseen in this 
 dream been Death mounting the stair in cowl 
 and shroud, instead of an auntish old lady 
 
r?nagmation in Dreams 67 
 
 descending from a cab with a velvet bag on 
 her arm, it would have been no more wonder- 
 ful as a precognition of the human mind. 
 That, however, is a consideration to which 
 no weight is allowed ; and for the rest, such 
 dreams can always be explained away by 
 resolute disbelief in them. In this case, for 
 example, is it certain that the young lady 
 was not in the secret of Aunt Susan's un- 
 announced visit to town t The question 
 asked, the dream is disposed of I am 
 conscious of looking foolish, and resolve to 
 say no more about curious dreams unless 
 they are of a romantic cast, and not then 
 without the smile that deprecates credulity. 
 
 In this way a good deal of evidence is 
 suppressed that would be useful in studying 
 the action of mind in sleep; but more im- 
 portant suppressions are due to another 
 motive. All dreaming is not of trivialities, 
 though of course most of it is — for the reason 
 that our minds and thoughts are com- 
 pounded of little else than small solicitudes 
 and trivial speculations. Yet there are excep- 
 tions — as rare, perhaps, as crises of thought 
 or of fate, but known to many and signally 
 
68 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 informing ; but when such dreams do occur 
 they are generally of such a nature that they 
 cannot be told, however much they may 
 seem to abound in new and convincing 
 significancies. They belong too much to 
 ourselves ; they are bound up too much with 
 episodes and accidents, memories and affec- 
 tions, which are shrouded even from our own 
 contemplation as long as we are not alone. 
 To hand out for public exhibition and debate 
 what is too sacred for our own thoughts 
 except in lonely times and solitary places is 
 beyond the impossible ; and science is suffi- 
 ciently at one with kindness to shrink from 
 asking any such sacrifice. But we may be 
 sure that a vast deal of very cogent illustra- 
 tion is thereby kept out of the inquiry. 
 
 The reader's humble servant who writes 
 this, which is meant to urge and help inquiry, 
 cannot himself overcome reluctance to tell 
 of dreams which seem to him profoundly 
 suggestive — perhaps conclusive — \{ the ques- 
 tion is whether our minds have or have not a 
 power of divination beyond what is meant 
 when we speak of intuitive faculties. And 
 so it is that A., whose dream of the watch 
 
Imagination in Dreams 69 
 
 has been quoted, will tell nothing of the two 
 previous dreams that fell on the same day of 
 the year ; though we see how he describes 
 their general meaning and effect. But there 
 was a fourth dream years and years after 
 those others ; and in so far as it bears on 
 their periodical occurrence on the morning 
 of the child's death (which seems to suggest 
 what would be called supernatural visita- 
 tion) — mention of it is permitted. 
 
 The fourth dream occurred a quarter of a 
 century after the third, which was the watch 
 dream. Not once in the interval had A. 
 dreamed of his son. On this last occasion 
 the vision was as clear and as impressive as 
 the others, and full of meaning expressed 
 darkly in a noble dramatic form. Of course 
 such visitations must needs be disturbing ; 
 and as A. sat in after-dinner idleness with 
 one of his kinsfolk next evening, the dream 
 recurred to him and he became lost in 
 thought about it. By-and-by his absorption 
 must have been manifest; for his kinswoman 
 asked what he was thinking of. She was 
 answered, of a wonderful dream, and of 
 whom ; upon which she said, ' Why, don't 
 
70 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 you know what day it is ? ' — Again the 
 anniversary dream, after twenty-five years of 
 interruption and although he had forgotten 
 the day ! And since he had forgotten the 
 day, whose memory was it that inspired the 
 dream, or what magic of imagination framed 
 it so wittingly for that morning of all morn- 
 ings of the year? 
 
 The authorship of these surpassing dreams 
 — dreams that surpass all that we can 
 believe ourselves capable of planning and 
 informing with so much meaning, beauty, 
 terror — must either be our own or else must 
 come from without. The Spirit of the Age 
 forbids belief in exterior influences as mere 
 superstition. But fancy is free, and we 
 are at liberty to please ourselves with the 
 conjecture that when our mental faculties 
 are discharged of their duty in sleep, resting 
 like harps from which the hand has been 
 withdrawn, some spiritual influence may 
 come in and take possession, turning them 
 to its own uses. It is at least a pretty 
 poetical kind of notion, fruitful of pleasure 
 as flowers are or a song, of which none can 
 make a meal. And the physiologist himself 
 
Imagination in Dreams 71 
 
 is bound to support it from his knife - and - 
 scalpel knowledge. An honest man, he will 
 admit that the supposed spiritual intelligence 
 need not break in like a thief. He knows 
 his nerve-systems, and his nerve-centres in 
 the brain of a man, which is the study, 
 workshop, and theatre of mind ; and he will 
 say that so little violence is needed to stir 
 imagination, or to move and direct the 
 springs of thought, that they will answer to 
 a touch light as the passing of a shadow 
 over the harp-strings of our simile. Just so 
 light, then, may be the touch of the spiritual 
 intelligence. But if, nevertheless, this fancy 
 and all such must be dismissed, we are 
 forced back upon the first alternative. The 
 authorship of these dreams is all our own ; 
 in which case the human mind has powers 
 which it cannot recognise as pertaining to 
 itself, neither can it comprehend them. 
 
 V 
 
 When dreams like these are discussed 
 by believers in an origin which, though 
 conceivably within the laws of Nature, is 
 
72 Imaginatio7i in D7^eains 
 
 unacknowledged by science, some subtle 
 communication of mind with mind at a 
 distance is assumed as the explanation of a 
 great deal. There certainly seems to be 
 some subtle communication of minds with 
 minds not at a distance, but yet locked from 
 each other in a silence which we are used to 
 think impenetrable as long as it remains 
 quite unbroken. Though, for example, the 
 experience I am about to mention may not 
 happen to anybody more than once or twice 
 in a lifetime, it has a lasting place in many 
 memories. You are walking with another 
 person, your friend, or perhaps more than 
 your friend ; no stranger in thought or feel- 
 ing at any rate. You have reached with 
 him the unbearable topmost height of some 
 dangerous dispute, some desperate difference. 
 / There is a dead silence ; then presently, as 
 if in a sudden expansion of the silence, you 
 hear a thought in your friend's mind, and 
 hear it, to your conviction, in the very words 
 it is framed in. He says this or this in his 
 heart (forming some impulsive resolution, 
 probably), and the unbreathed words are as 
 plain to you as to himself 
 
Imagination in Dreams 73 
 
 This is a well-tested experience, and in all 
 likelihood not an uncommon one. And since 
 such very distinct ' waves of communication ' 
 do flow from mind to mind at a little dis- 
 tance, it is no unreasonable guess that they 
 may sometimes extend farther. Some psycho- 
 logical inquirers have no doubt that they do ; 
 and supposing them right, many dreams 
 which, though by no means rare, are strangely 
 significant, become immediately comprehen- 
 sible. This one, for example ; which is not 
 related for its singularity, but only as illus- 
 trative of the kind of dreams which are 
 explained by wave-communication. After a 
 brief absence from home a certain man 
 returns very late at night. On his table he 
 finds a letter from a lady who was at one 
 time a close acquaintance of himself and his 
 family, but whom he has not seen for many 
 months. The letter is to this effect : — ' I 
 know that you used to believe in me as 
 something of a witch, and so I take courage 
 to tell you of a dream that has impressed 
 my own mind enough to make it restless. 
 It is on my conscience to tell you. I dreamt 
 last night that So-and-so (naming a very 
 
74 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 dear friend of her correspondent's) was ill — 
 dying, indeed ; and that he was calling for 
 you, and exclaiming that you must go to see 
 him before seven o'clock.' Now the recipient 
 of the letter knew that his friend was ill, but 
 had no reason to believe that the case had 
 become desperate. Nevertheless the message 
 disturbed him greatly, and all the more 
 because it was now two o'clock in the morn- 
 ing, and he had no idea but that the ' witch's ' 
 seven o'clock pointed to that hour of the 
 previous evening. And perhaps it did so in 
 her own mind ; but however that may have 
 been, the poor man died unvisited by his 
 friend at about seven o'clock on the morning 
 when the letter was received. 
 
 This is the ' wave-of-communication ' 
 dream, the like of which has been told so 
 many times that it has become common- 
 place. The custom is to believe such dreams 
 true and strange when they happen to our- 
 selves, and to doubt them altogether when 
 they happen to anybody else. Much the 
 same thing meets the view in a very different 
 field of observation. When a man is in love 
 himself he thinks nothing more serious in 
 
Imagination in Dreams 75 
 
 the world ; when he sees another man in 
 love he thinks nothing more ridiculous. I 
 myself confess to little interest in wave- 
 communication dreams, looking beyond them 
 to more mysterious matter. But that may 
 be found even here, as will plainly appear 
 from the dream I am about to relate — one 
 that would be strange indeed if it happened 
 to be singular. There is no singularity in 
 any such experiences. 
 
 Between a certain man and woman — both 
 of a rather romantic cast — a strong affection 
 had grown up from childhood ; an affection 
 very much tried but never quenched, nor, 
 apparently, ever diminished. Through a 
 variety of commonplace mistakes and hin- 
 drances they could not marry. They had to 
 remain apart, and nearly always at a distance ; 
 but with communication enough to be as- 
 sured from time to time over ten or twelve 
 years that the old affection remained what 
 it was at the beginning. Towards the end 
 of this period the man was tormented by a 
 series of dreams, occurring at intervals of 
 days, weeks, and months, in which the woman 
 figured as avowing herself ' false as Cressid ' 
 
76 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 and shamelessly glorying in her freedom. 
 ' Tormented ' was his own word ; but not 
 because these dreams ever disturbed his faith 
 for a single waking moment. Indeed, he 
 described himself (to me ; I was his confi- 
 dant or confessor at the time, and therefore 
 can speak to the truth of this relation) as 
 puzzled and humiliated that such phantasies 
 should invade his mind by any avenue or in 
 any shape. The torment was felt no longer 
 than the dream lasted, or till he had shaken 
 off the horror he woke in. It was not sur- 
 prising to hear, however, that the repetition 
 of these visions during a space of two or 
 three years became increasingly distressing, 
 and the more so because their only differ- 
 ence was in scene and circumstance. There 
 was a casual meeting, now on a country road, 
 now on a sea-side parade, now at a garden- 
 party ; but whatever the place of meeting 
 the same thing happened on all occasions. 
 With a defiant gaiety, and with a ' Now, do 
 you suppose ? ' or a ' Why, dear me, yes ! ' or 
 ' Are you so stupid as to imagine ? ' she 
 scattered confessions as lightly as if she were 
 flinging roses. The lady died, and when she 
 
Imagination in Drea^ns "]*] 
 
 was dead the leaves of a sealed book opened 
 (how, need not be told) revealing what no 
 one expected to read in it, and all in accord- 
 ance with her lover's dreams. Not that 
 there were any signs of the pagan audacity 
 that was so amazing in them ; but, on the 
 contrary, tokens of violent passions of re- 
 morse, frequently recurrent. 
 
 Little help from superstition is needed to 
 impress one with a story like this. It should 
 be marked that R.'s persistent dreams were 
 not accounted for by doubt, by jealousy, 
 or by anything seen or heard that could 
 sow the seed of suspicion. Nothing that 
 was native to his own mind suggested 
 them ; they were dreams of intimation from 
 without, if any such there be. And yet in 
 explaining them by the wave-of-communica- 
 tion hypothesis an extremely curious and 
 interesting difficulty has to be encountered. 
 It is almost inconceivable that even in her 
 most mute and secret musings, the unhappy 
 woman could have wished to present herself 
 to her lover's mind as she did appear to 
 him in sleep. To be sure, the psychologist 
 or the poet may make something of it, as 
 
78 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 the communication of a wild and impulsive 
 remorse. We know that remorse will some- 
 times drive a sensitive nature to extravagant 
 lengths of self-condemnation and self-punish- 
 ment ; and if the poet chose, he could make 
 a pretty picture of the poor lady overcome 
 at times with violent shame at her deceit 
 — her mind straining with a wish that he 
 might be defrauded of his confidence no 
 longer, and going forth to him in an excess 
 of penitence and extravagant self-revelation. 
 It is quite credible, and quite in accord with 
 what is known of human nature and human 
 conduct. For some men and women, self- 
 accusation of the most merciless kind answers 
 to an act of atonement ; it is confession and 
 penance at the same time. This is the 
 explanation of a great deal in Carlyle's little 
 book written after his wife's death. 
 
 VI 
 
 Whether, putting aside all question of 
 warning, or revealing, or prophetic sleep- 
 visions, dreams are of service to the dreamer 
 
Imagination in Dreams 79 
 
 has often been discussed ; the general opinion 
 being that they are quite valueless in this 
 respect. The truth is that, like books in 
 Greek or Portuguese, they are valueless to 
 as many as find them so. The experience 
 from which opinion is drawn differs widely ; 
 besides, as we have already said, this is a 
 matter in which most men are resolutely 
 suspicious of the experience of others. It is 
 no less absurd to compare the dreaming of 
 one man with that of another, than to assume 
 in all mankind an equal capacity for com- 
 posing music. I find in some an inveterate 
 disinclination to believe that any dream — 
 especially if it includes various scenes and 
 many incidents — can be as orderly and 
 natural throughout as if it were really a 
 passage in real life ; yet there are other 
 some, and by no means extraordinary people 
 either, whose dreams are often of that char- 
 acter, without repeating actual scenes and 
 events in a single particular. 
 
 Nearly all dreams, however, can be 
 brought into one theory — namely, that 
 since in dreams we pass through a great 
 variety of experiences, none of which are 
 
8o Imagination in Dreams 
 
 ever likely to befall us in life, we may be 
 put to tests of character which would never 
 try us otherwise ; and therefore that we 
 ought to come by this means into a better 
 acquaintance with ourselves. If, for example, 
 I have never been placed in a position of ex- 
 treme danger — as by attack of armed thieves, 
 or in a burning house with others more 
 helpless than myself — how am I to know 
 what my feelings and conduct would be in 
 such circumstances ? Think of himself what 
 he may, no candid man with a general know- 
 ledge of human nature can give a confident 
 answer to that question. It is a common 
 experience to find in oneself a surprising 
 coolness and resource, or a totally unsus- 
 pected and crushing cowardice, under a 
 sudden severe test. To some such test, it 
 has been surmised, we are frequently ex- 
 posed in dreams. Here we'^are assailed by 
 perils which seem imaginary neither to in- 
 telligence nor sense. While they endure we 
 pass through emotions strong enough to 
 affect our physical senses no less than if the 
 danger were real (as broken knuckles and 
 quaking limbs attest when we wake), and 
 
Imagination in Dreams 8i 
 
 therefore all the more to be trusted as like to 
 those which we should feel were the dream a 
 reality. 
 
 If this supposition held good there could 
 be no doubt about the common usefulness 
 of dreams. Anybody can dream of being 
 attacked by burglars, or of being immured 
 in a burning house, or of struggling with 
 others to escape from a sinking ship. Mani- 
 fold trials of this kind are prepared for every 
 man that sleeps ; and supposing them to be 
 really instructive, really enlightening and 
 edifying, they might well be fancied as 
 brought into the scheme of Nature by bene- 
 ficent design. Only by the aid of imagina- 
 tion do we apprehend the sorrow and suffer- 
 ing, or perhaps the grief and the remorse, 
 unapportioned to ourselves ; and it is well 
 that they should be apprehended to the full 
 for our own sakes, as well as for any good 
 that a sympathetic understanding of our 
 fellow-creatures may be. And the conjec- 
 ture is that the fireside musings of imagina- 
 tion are helped out by the intense dramatic 
 force with which it casts us into scenes of 
 trial indistinguishable from reality, which we 
 F 
 
82 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 not only see but share. And not only into 
 scenes of trial, as it might be in a * forlorn 
 hope ' or on a raft at sea. We sometimes 
 dream of passing into conditions of tempta- 
 tion and guilt such as it is hardly possible 
 we shall ever fall into ; and so we taste of 
 both in a measure which cannot be acquired 
 from novels and newspapers. 
 
 To illustrate my meaning, I must revert 
 to my own experience. 
 
 Many years ago I dreamed of having 
 killed a man by throwing him from the 
 verge of an old, unfrequented quay. The 
 murder itself did not come into the dream, 
 which began (according to my waking re- 
 membrance) just after I had turned from 
 the scene. It might have been a dream 
 of horror as well as guilt — of horror, the 
 torment of which, we may suspect, is often 
 tempered by the thought of it as a punish- 
 ment that atones. But the deed being out 
 of sight, so to speak, in my case horror there 
 was none. The dream was of guilt alone; 
 and whenever I review that vision of myself 
 stealing away through the old streets that 
 bordered the quay (it was early morning and 
 
Imagination in Dreams ^2) 
 
 the streets were bathed in a thin clear slant- 
 ing light), and when I recall my sensations, 
 the whole mind of me an abyss of listening 
 silence, my very footsteps seeming noiseless, 
 and a wide environment of distance stand- 
 ing between me and every passer-by, I be- 
 lieve I really do know the awful solitude a 
 murderer feels, or know it far beyond mere 
 imagining. 
 
 Now no man can be the worse, he must be 
 benefited in every sense by such experiences. 
 They are expansion, enlightenment, disci- 
 pline ; and they fall to everybody's share. 
 But though they usually have that advantage 
 in some shape, this kind of dream cannot be 
 depended on for revealing us to ourselves. 
 If sometimes they do, on other occasions we 
 say and do in them what by no persuasion 
 can we think natural or possible so long as 
 we keep our wits about us. But though 
 dream-adventure cannot be thought trust- 
 worthy as a test of character, it has its uses 
 in that respect — for some natures more than 
 others, of course ; and there can be no doubt 
 that it brings us to the experience of emo- 
 tions which would be otherwise known feebly 
 
84 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 or not at all. The dream above related is 
 no proof that if I did commit murder I 
 should feel as I felt then ; but it was a most 
 impressive, a most terrible and convincing 
 lesson in what a murderer naturally feels 
 when he is not a born assassin. If, beyond 
 the entertainment it affords, there be any 
 use in literature, any use in the novelist's 
 pictures, the poet's revelations, the drama- 
 tist's embodiment and display of human 
 feeling, it must be something to have the 
 stage erected in our own breasts, the scene 
 our own lives, the stir of emotion and passion 
 our own in situations of acute trial and in- 
 tense meaning. 
 
 And there is a quieter domain, regions 
 purely intellectual and perceptive indeed, 
 where imagination serves us to a wonder in 
 dreams. An illustration of what I mean 
 came into the experience of a lady who 
 dreamed one night that she was in heaven, 
 but in no new scene. It was the heaven of 
 the old Italian painters. The celestial plains 
 lay before her, and, viewing them, her sight 
 was carried over so vast a space, her eyes 
 saw into such immensities of distance, that 
 
hnaginatioti ifi Dreams 85 
 
 the infinite has been ever since far more 
 comprehensible to her than it was before. 
 Her vision had travelled into it ; and the 
 memory of the voyage remaining with her, 
 it enabled her to think of eternity also with 
 a diminished sense of frustration. Can that 
 be called an idle dream which brings to an 
 imaginative mind a fuller and more lasting 
 conception of infinitude than philosophy 
 could attain to by centuries of thought ? 
 
 There is so much reluctance to mention 
 any dream in implied belief that it may mean 
 something, that I must go to my own store 
 for another illustration : it shall be the last. 
 
 One night, when I was a boy, I dreamed 
 of a very beautiful landscape. At that time 
 I had never seen under the sky anything 
 to compare with it for beauty ; a matter 
 of small consequence, however, when three 
 fields, a pond, a flowering hedge, and a group 
 of trees were enough to make a Garden of 
 Paradise any day. But I had seen pictures. 
 Turner engravings, and the like, and no 
 doubt it was these that imagination took in 
 hand when it showed me more loveliness in 
 a single view than earth can offer to the 
 
86 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 eye's embrace. But that seems too much to 
 say — exaggerate, ungrateful; and in truth 
 the magic was rather in the vision than the 
 view. It was a scene in which all that is 
 most beautiful in the valley-landscape of this 
 land came together in an immensity of range. 
 A valley of no great depth as measured by 
 its extent, but one that might have been pro- 
 portioned to the whole western sky as viewed 
 from a hill at sundown. Its breadth was the 
 breadth of two Wensleydales, two Swaledales, 
 and three vales of Festiniog and valleys 
 of the Wye ; with the loveliness of all of 
 them in terraced rock, hanging woods, deep 
 meadows, and winding waters. And as you 
 looked down the valley, an unending succes- 
 sion oi distances. 
 
 This was the wonder of the scene ; and 
 here it was that the Genius of Dreams, the 
 omnipotent Imagination which I sing, gave 
 to my vision a magic which I do not suppose 
 was ever conceived of by waking thought. 
 Distance rose upon distance, each in its own 
 boundary, so to speak, as the eye travelled 
 on from one to the other. As I gazed 
 down the valley from where I stood, the 
 
Imagination in Dreams 87 
 
 general view melted in the long, gently- 
 streaming gradations of perspective that may 
 be seen on any clear day in any open land- 
 scape ; but there was this difference. When 
 I looked onward to some mile-away spot, 
 half lost in soft obscurity, the haze immedi- 
 ately began to lift, light entered into the 
 obscure, and this was now my foreground, 
 with a foreground's clearness and parti- 
 cularity. As a natural consequence, the 
 distance beyond took a new aspect of grada- 
 tion. The bridge which a moment ago, 
 when I began to look fixedly at it to make 
 it out, lay far down the river, was now at my 
 feet. I could see the wagon slanting down 
 from the crown of it, and watch the cattle in 
 the fields that sloped to the stream on either 
 side. But no sooner was attention with- 
 drawn from this spot than I insensibly fell 
 back to my first standpoint. The newly- 
 opened scene closed ; and in a moment the 
 bridge and all about it were again in the 
 dim poetic distance of a master more masterly 
 than Claude : and so it was to every point in 
 the landscape. Going forth to any part with 
 curiosity, my vision carried within itself the 
 
88 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 same light. Though the place seemed miles 
 away, every detail opened to view when it 
 was looked upon intently, and then was lost 
 again in the general beauty of the scene. 
 
 No painter could give me that actual 
 visual experience and the memory of it, nor 
 could anything in Nature but imagination in 
 a dream. Through the splendidly creative 
 power of that faculty when it is supposed to 
 be in disorder and ridiculous, I have had 
 such uses of sight as a millionaire might 
 reasonably buy with a little fortune were 
 they a marketable commodity ; and not only 
 do they remain to me as a constant memory, 
 with all the pleasure which the remembrance 
 of any wonderful and beautiful thing can 
 give, but as a lasting aid to fancy whenever 
 it is my luck to view a far-reaching valley 
 scene like that in my dream. 
 
 VII 
 
 Here we may make an end of this rambhng 
 discourse, the intention of which is plain 
 enough, I hope. It is not to reinstate a 
 
Iviagination in Dreams 89 
 
 superstitious interpretation of dreams, or to 
 encourage the practice of searching into 
 them for omens as fortune-tellers pry into 
 the lees of a cup of tea. The purpose is to 
 show cause for a more liberal, a more com- 
 prehensive, and at the same time a more dis- 
 criminating treatment of dreams whenever 
 they are inquired into. As it is, the inquiry 
 is almost invariably approached either in the 
 spirit of the old superstition or in the new 
 spirit of materialism and mockery. Dreams 
 have neither interest nor meaning for the one 
 if they do not disclose the operation of super- 
 natural agencies, impalpable influences from 
 without ; the other is narrowed into a pre- 
 determination to believe in the dissecting 
 knife, the microscope, and the galvanic 
 battery as the only interpreters of Man to 
 himself. Each spirit has an own rewarding 
 delight to look to : the supernaturalist revel- 
 ling in a mysticism deliciously haunted with 
 fearsomeness ; the other never so pleased as 
 when it can show the glory and mystery of 
 sight lodging in a dirty little patch of eye- 
 pigment, or when it tracks the brightest hopes, 
 joys, and inspirations of a life to some other 
 
90 hjtagination in Dreams 
 
 secretion : and each goes astray after its 
 particular enjoyments. 
 
 Dreams are best studied as manifestations 
 of mind, and above all for the most mysteri- 
 ous and powerful of its faculties, memory 
 and imagination. The notion that all dream- 
 ing is due to the same causes, and they 
 physiological in the baser sense, should be 
 discarded : it is no more true, at any rate, 
 than that all thinking can be traced to 
 physiological excitements and disturbances. 
 It would help the debate to a reasonable 
 conclusion were we to go further, giving up 
 the assumption that sleep is and must be an 
 inferior condition for mind to work in. There 
 is no a priori justification for thinking so — 
 no difficulty in accepting the conceit that 
 while the people of some neighbouring 
 planet spend their waking hours without a 
 thought beyond the conduct of life and its 
 enjoyments, their minds fill in sleep with 
 all the best of their musing, planning, invent- 
 ing, moralising. It will certainly be con- 
 venient to suspend the conclusion that 
 dreams are always occasioned by sensibilities 
 in a condition of disorder. Some are, no 
 
Imagination in Dreams 91 
 
 doubt, and by far the most ; but others, as 
 we have shown abundantly though by few 
 examples, can only be explained by a state 
 of mind so different as to be the opposite of 
 disorder. There may have been disorder to 
 begin with, and probably was ; but then 
 there was r^-order, upon a different scheme 
 and use of the various qualities of mind. 
 
 M. Maury, who has treated of this subject 
 with great care experimentally and at con- 
 siderable length, believes entirely in mental 
 disorder as the explanation of dreams ; and 
 yet his observations compel him to say in 
 one place, ' Mais ce qui est plus etrange, c'est 
 que I'intelligence peut accomplir de prime 
 abord, sans I'intervention de la volonte, un 
 acte qui denote le concours de toutes les 
 autres facultes.' No doubt ; and since that 
 power is so often and so strongly manifested, 
 it becomes a wonder which is neither un- 
 miracled nor chased away by the verdict 
 * Mind in a condition of disorder.' Why dis- 
 order, considering how much is accomplished 
 by the concurrence of our other faculties, 
 when we are awake^ without the conscious 
 exertion or even the conscious supervision of 
 
92 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 the will ? M. Maury should have reflected 
 (for the reflection carries far) that many of 
 the tasks we set ourselves are begun, not by 
 a determination of will to begin them, but 
 by the stir and solicitation of the faculties 
 necessary to their accomplishment. 
 
 As for his experimenting in the produc- 
 tion of dreams, the most remarkable thing 
 about it is the fallacy it is grounded on. 
 Sleeping men have been made to dream ' to 
 order.' They have been made to dream 
 according to the experimentalist's intention 
 by whispering * Fire ' into their ears, or by 
 exposing their naked feet to a current of 
 cold air, or by drumming on a window-pane, 
 or in other ways selected for the purpose ; 
 and this being accomplished it is said that 
 dreaming can have little claim to serious 
 consideration. But if dreaming is to be 
 scouted on that ground, thinking should go 
 with it. For while there is little difficulty in 
 making a sleeping man dream of a certain 
 order of things, this or that, there is still 
 less difficulty in directing his thoughts into 
 any channel you choose to send them into 
 when he is awake ; nor need you employ 
 
hnagination in Dreams 93 
 
 any different means. Without his previous 
 knowledge and consent, turn a cold draught 
 of air upon the back of his neck from a 
 window-sash ; address a few words to him 
 in the voice of Punchinello ; murmur the 
 name of his wife in a drowsy interval of 
 silence ; nay, do but ask of him the present 
 price of coal, and be sure that in a moment 
 his mind will be filled with thoughts and 
 images of your own ordaining. 
 
 And it is plain that dreams would not 
 cease to be a worthy object of study though 
 the usual explanation of their origin (when 
 it is not said to be indigestion) were ascer- 
 tained to be correct. No sooner does it 
 appear that a dream was occasioned by the 
 firing of a gun, a shouting in the street, or 
 some other external provocation, than all 
 interest in it is allowed to drop. However 
 remarkable the vision may be in itself, show 
 that it started from the slamming of a door, 
 and the first feeling of mystery is immediately 
 dispelled, a laugh is raised as if at the detec- 
 tion of some ridiculous imposture, and the 
 dream is thought of no more. But it may 
 deserve a great deal of attention however 
 
 
94 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 started. The firing of a gun is naturally 
 suggestive of numberless dramatic scenes ; 
 but it does not account for the prodigious 
 rapidity with which a long succession of 
 images will pass before the mind in the 
 dream that ensues upon the sound. There 
 is nothing in such noises to explain how it is 
 that when we are awake, and with all our 
 wits in order and alert, the mind would be a 
 hundred times longer in reviewing the scenes 
 of a dream or taking in its details. Neither 
 can such noises account for the fact that the 
 drama of dreams is presented to the mind's 
 eye with a vividness far beyond all that 
 our waking imagination can achieve when 
 put to the utmost strain. It is not from 
 them that we draw a power of invention 
 which it would puzzle us to equal with our 
 eyes open ; nor because dreams may be 
 started by the ringing of a bell or the patter 
 of rain on a window are we forbidden to 
 speculate on the prodigious activities and 
 potentialities of imagination which those 
 phenomena seem to disclose. 
 
 As to the confusion in dreams, the rapid 
 inconsequence of them, the swift transitions, 
 
Lmagmatio}i in Dreams 95 
 
 the sudden changings and mergings of scene 
 and circumstance which so often make them 
 seem merely ridiculous, two things have to 
 be considered. Since the whole transaction 
 of a dream proceeds at so great a pace, it is 
 not remarkable that the transitions should 
 appear monstrously abrupt to our waking 
 senses. But especially it should be re- 
 membered that few of us note at the end of 
 the day how many hours of it have been 
 spent in a loose medley of imaginings as 
 excursive as those that occupy our minds in 
 sleep, and like them in this very particular 
 of breaking off in abrupt and incongruous 
 transitions : — like them, too, in being soon 
 forgotten. Here again, however, the greater 
 activity, force, and impressiveness of imagina- 
 tion in sleep becomes apparent. For the 
 day-dreams in which, unnoticed by ourselves, 
 so many hours of our waking life are spent, 
 are not only paler than those others while 
 they last, but are hardly ever remembered 
 for five minutes. None are remembered as 
 vividly as many a dream of the night, 
 though such dreams have become proverbs 
 of passing things ; and — unless they are 
 
96 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 something more than day-dreams — never do 
 they influence thought, feeling, conduct in 
 any degree ; which is not true of dreams of 
 the night. 
 
 NOTES 
 
 PROLEPTIC DREAMS 
 
 In the preceding pages some examples of the 
 proleptic dream are given. Another of equal 
 significance, though not perhaps so amusing in 
 detail, was supplied to me from the note-book of 
 a distinguished architect. He says : — 
 
 'Early in 1886, when the excitement about 
 Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill was at its height, 
 I dreamt that I was surveying one of the royal 
 palaces, and had to pass up one of the staircases. 
 On the half-landing I came upon the Queen in 
 conversation with a lady whom I knew intuitively 
 to be a Miss Cowper. I did not know, nor did I 
 ever know, of such a person in real life. I caught 
 the drift of the conversation. Miss Cowper was 
 endeavouring to persuade the Queen to withhold 
 the royal assent from Mr. Gladstone's Bill when 
 it came before her. At this point I offered to 
 withdraw, but was asked to remain by the Queen, 
 who said that what she had to say might be heard 
 
Imagination in Dreams 97 
 
 by any one of her subjects. The conversation 
 continued at great length, Miss Cowper seeming 
 to urge every argument at her command, the 
 Queen declaring that she would not depart from 
 constitutional usage. 
 
 ' During the entire conversation I was annoyed 
 by a loud ticking noise, which I could not account 
 for. 
 
 'The scene of the dream changed, and the 
 time. It was the morning following the conver- 
 sation that I was in the smoking-room of a certain 
 club. There I saw a well-known publisher, who 
 asked me whether I had seen the Times of that 
 day. It contained, he said, an account of a very 
 interesting conversation between the Queen and 
 Miss Cowper; "and," he added, "your name is 
 mentioned in connection with it." I got the 
 paper, and saw the conversation printed at length. 
 It occupied several columns, and I marked the 
 introduction of my own appearance, and the 
 Queen's desire that I should remain. At this 
 point it flashed across me that the ticking noise 
 which I had heard was accounted for. I said to 
 myself, " All the time the conversation was going 
 on it was being telegraphed to the Times office." ' 
 
 Here again the mind constructs a dramatic 
 scene, some integral parts of which it conceals 
 from itself as an intended surprise for itself at the 
 conclusion of the tale. A mental operation far 
 out of the range of possibility in our waking 
 hours, but accomplished in dreams. 
 G 
 
98 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 TIME AND SPACE IN DREAMS 
 
 A tutor, worn out with work by day and watch- 
 ing by night, was examining a pupil one day from 
 a question-and-answer book. The business had 
 not got very far when, immediately after reading 
 out a question, the tired man closed his eyes. 
 Seizing the occasion, weariness betrayed him in- 
 stantly; he slept and dreamed. It was a long, 
 long dream, carrying him through many scenes 
 and events. Hours of dreaming it seemed ; and 
 yet he woke in time enough to hear the last words 
 of the answer to his question. . Fifteen seconds, 
 perhaps, for the whole episode : the falling to 
 sleep, the beginning of the dream, the develop- 
 ment of its changing times, scenes, and conversa- 
 tion, their cessation, and the return to conscious 
 wakefulness. 
 
 This is the most remarkable illustration of 
 dream rapidity (it was given to me by the 
 dreamer himself) that has ever come to my 
 knowledge ; though many others equally convinc- 
 ing have been recorded. Indeed, no characteristic 
 of dreaming is so well ascertained as this, which 
 is one of its greatest marvels. xA.nd yet the 
 general disposition is to regard it less as a wonder 
 than an absurdity. That a man should dream of 
 embarking in a ship, of sailing out into a storm, 
 and of passing through all the horrors of ship- 
 wreck between one gust of wind and another, is 
 
( 
 
 Imagination in Dreams 99 
 
 much oftener told to illustrate the oddity of 
 dreaming than the amazing facility of our mental 
 qualities when they are not exerted. 'As quick 
 as thought,' it is said. But here there is a power 
 much quicker than thought. By thoughts we do 
 not always mean reasonings and conclusions. 
 We also mean conceptions, ideas, which, as they 
 flash into the mind, are often accompanied by or 
 are themselves mental pictures.^ But in dreams 
 the ideas, the conceptions, or even reasonings and 
 conclusions, like those embodied in the dream- 
 fable of the watch, are cast into regular dramatic 
 form. They are acted out in a succession of 
 scenes. But the drama which would take hours 
 to present on any stage but this of the human 
 mind, passes with its multitude of particulars in a 
 few moments. With all its array of speeches, 
 scenes, events, and with all the long succession 
 of observations and emotions it gives rise to, it 
 begins and ends in how long a time? The ques- 
 tion is answered by the tutor's experience. 
 
 On any theory of dreams this is a wonder no 
 less worthy of consideration than such matters as 
 the atmosphere of Mars ; on the theory that 
 dreams are the product of imagination working 
 without the guidance of the reasoning and critical 
 powers, it is a wonder that may be particularly 
 informing as to imagination itself. For on this 
 theory it seems that the first of faculties, freed 
 from control in sleep, finds its own way of doing 
 as much as the mind can do in its harmonious 
 
loo Imagination in Dreams 
 
 entirety. Moreover, it plays the part of all in one 
 with such a prodigiously rapid use of splendid 
 but apparently tedious means that the mind in its 
 harmonious entirety cannot even understand how 
 it is done. 
 
 In most fields of investigation the discovery of 
 a power like this would suggest that other amazing 
 displays of power may not be quite illusory ; and 
 I do not know why philosophy should reject the 
 suggestion here. 
 
 DKEAMS OF REVELATION 
 
 A lady whose name is honourably known to the 
 world sent me the following story a little while 
 since : — 
 
 ' Until I was more than sixteen years old I had 
 never lived at home. I was always away at 
 English or foreign schools ; and when I did come 
 home for vacation it was to join my family at a 
 house by the sea. Therefore a great town business- 
 house belonging to my father was perfectly strange 
 to me when I went home to it a little while before 
 his death. After his death the business fell into 
 the hands of my mother, who knew nothing of 
 such affairs, and was robbed shamefully by her 
 servants. We girls were never allowed to know 
 anything of business matters; and though it is 
 possible that I heard these robberies complained 
 of, I gave little heed to them. 
 
 ' One night when all the family had gone to 
 
Imagination in Dreams loi 
 
 bed I stayed up reading Don Quixote. I read by 
 the light of a single candle in a large drawing- 
 room. Even now, looking back, I cannot be 
 convinced that I fell asleep, or decide that what 
 was perhaps a dream was not a vision. On hear- 
 ing a church-bell ring the first quarter past one I 
 looked up from my book. Opposite was my 
 dead father's favourite armchair. To my astonish- 
 ment a black veil seemed to lie over it. While I 
 rubbed my eyes and again stared, the veil lightened 
 till it became gray ; and in the ugly mist a shape 
 became visible. With a slowness which still fills 
 me with horror to remember, the shape took the 
 lineaments of my father : not as I had seen him 
 dead, but grayer, thinner, and with a dreadful 
 clayey look about him. Taking up the candle, 
 he told me to follow him and learn the secret of 
 the robberies, which, he said, were greater than 
 they were supposed to be ; and at the same time 
 he named as culprit a man-servant whom we 
 all trusted and were attached to. As for me, I 
 should as soon have suspected my mother as this 
 man. I followed my father downstairs into parts 
 of the house that were unfamiliar to me. He 
 opened the doors without any difficulty, though 
 the keys were upstairs in my mother's room. 
 
 'I can affirm that I never heard the word 
 " sky-light " until my father pronounced it that 
 night, as he showed me the thing of that name 
 above a back door leading into a dark, un- 
 frequented street. This he told me had been in 
 
I02 Imagination in Dreams 
 
 his day carefully locked every night. Since then, 
 it seemed, nobody had ever thought of fastening 
 it ; and by means of my dream it was soon proved 
 that thieves who were the accomplices of our 
 trusted servant used to come in and go out 
 through this skylight.' 
 
THE STUDY OF DREAMS 
 
THE STUDY OF DREAMS 
 
 I 
 
 No process or transaction of mind has 
 engaged so much attention for so many 
 centuries as our dreaming when we sleep. 
 Long before there was any thinking about 
 thought — which we may fairly suppose 
 seemed no more strange to thousands of 
 generations than the power to walk, and was 
 no more inquired into — there was thinking 
 about dreams. In what order the various 
 faculties of mind developed there is no know- 
 ing for certain ; but this we know, that dogs 
 have mind enough to dream, and it is reason- 
 able to believe that the first use of speculation 
 amongst human creatures was to infer the 
 existence of gods and devils from the physical 
 phenomena of Nature, and from dreams that 
 there is an invisible world whence the spirits 
 of the dead return. For races like our own 
 
io6 The Study of Dreams 
 
 — for all, indeed — it is a far cry back to the 
 times when thought began to brood upon 
 these things, but it has never ceased to do 
 so in the same way. Grave Interpreters of 
 Dreams are no longer to be found in the 
 retinue of courts where the highest wisdom 
 is taught and science is best known, but to 
 the mass of mankind, including some of the 
 wisest, dreams still present themselves as 
 belonging to the supernatural. No doubt 
 they may be dismissed five minutes afterward 
 as nothing of the kind — Reason stepping in 
 to perform her function according to what- 
 ever ability she may be endowed with in 
 each particular case. Or perhaps it is not 
 the man's own reason that intervenes (there 
 being not enough of it for the purpose), but 
 only an echo of the reasoning of others. 
 But however that may be, we are all aware 
 of an inherent habit of mind, so strong that 
 whenever an impressive, a mysterious, a 
 seemingly meaningful dream occurs to us, 
 Reason has to be called in at first or second 
 hand to persuade us that there is nothing 
 supernatural about it. And Reason does 
 not always succeed. It says its say, and we 
 
The Study of Dreams 107 
 
 assent to what it says ; for is it not Reason 
 that speaks ? But what it denies it doesn't 
 destroy. Otherwise, there would be no need 
 of calHng upon it again when the next 
 * strange ' dream occurs, and the next, and 
 the next after that ; which, though it be the 
 hundredth of its kind, has only to be a little 
 stranger than the rest and the old supersti- 
 tion revives in all its original force. 
 
 The truth seems to be that in this matter 
 as in many others we go in perpetual mas- 
 querade. At a certain stage of advancement 
 in civilisation it is with our minds as with 
 our bodies. We discover an impropriety of 
 appearance in both when naked ; and for 
 our own comfort quite as much as for the 
 general convenience, we clothe the one as 
 well as the other in commonly-approved 
 garments. Twelve ladies and gentlemen at 
 a dinner-table, a dozen voices sadly deplor- 
 ing something wrong in somebody's char- 
 acter or somebody's history, no voice sound- 
 ing insincere either to its utterer or to any 
 one else at the social board, and not a soul 
 of the whole twelve capable of affirming to 
 itself that it sees anything very wrong in the 
 
io8 The Study of Dreams 
 
 conduct or the sentiment condemned. As 
 they shake their heads and look solemnly- 
 down, none of the party are conscious for a 
 moment that they are not their natural 
 selves. They are their natural selves now, 
 with their clothes on. It is when their 
 clothes are off that they feel in an em- 
 barrassed uncomfortable way that they are 
 not their natural selves, and hasten to cover 
 themselves up accordingly. 
 
 And as it is with our unfinished morals, so 
 it is with our inveterate superstitions. When 
 they come upon the carpet we laugh at them, 
 as by custom and in duty bound ; but they 
 themselves are incapable of shame and can- 
 not be laughed away. There are men who, 
 with more or less of hesitation, do avow belief 
 in the supernatural character of dreams, and 
 the number of such persons among the 
 educated seems to be increasing rather than 
 diminishing just now. But the general dis- 
 position is to take the cue from science and 
 declare all belief of the kind to be ridiculous ; 
 yet here we might again begin the tale of 
 twelve ladies and gentlemen at a dinner- 
 table. The talk is of dreams. All that 
 
The Study of Dreams 109 
 
 seems remarkable in them is ascribed by 
 common consent to mere coincidence, to 
 latent memories, to unconscious colouring on 
 the part of the dreamer, and the like ; but 
 all the while one half of the company at 
 least is very sure, in secret, that none of 
 these explanations apply to dreams of their ' 
 own. There was more than that in them^ , 
 and the something unascertained lay beyond 
 all that modern Science and Philosophy 
 acknowledge as the natural order of things. 
 So persistent in the human mind are the 
 superstitions which awoke in it with the first 
 dawnings of conscious thought ; and being 
 perpetuated through ages and ages of mental 
 development, of physical brain-growth, they 
 have not improbably entered into the very 
 mechanism of mind. 
 
 How rooted is the association of dreams 
 with the supernatural may be seen by the dis- 
 cussion whenever they are taken up for serious 
 debate. Till lately, the argument has been all 
 on one side — the formal argument, that is to 
 say ; but this is a day of high psychological 
 and spiritual inquiry : there are seekers for 
 truth in every known superstition, and of 
 
no The Study of Dreams 
 
 course for foundations of truth in the super- 
 natural conception of dreams. And when 
 we look to what is said on either side, we 
 see that the main point with both is to put 
 superstition on its trial. Both stick closely 
 to the question, Do dreams tell of spiritual 
 influences which science derides as illusory, 
 or is science right and dreams a mere phan- 
 tasmal product of corporal disturbance ? 
 That is the one point to which the dispute 
 is addressed, with so much of an exclusive 
 eagerness that inquiry rarely strays away 
 from it. And yet either side may be right, 
 within certain limits, while neglecting a more 
 fruitful study of dreams than the one that 
 each pursues. 
 
 What this may be will presently be men- 
 tioned. Meanwhile, let us glance at the 
 controversy as usually conducted — so far, 
 at least, as to see how far each set of 
 disputants goes in asserting or denying the 
 supernatural quality of dreams.^ 
 
 To choose a name of authority, Dr. 
 
 ^ ' Supernatural,' as employed here and elsewhere, is not 
 a very satisfactory word ; but it is the best that presents 
 itself for use, and its use is not likely to be mistaken. 
 
The Study of Dreams 1 1 1 
 
 RadcUffe — a distinguished physician of our 
 own day, who was greatly given up to meta- 
 physics and psychology — drew from dreams 
 very large inferences indeed. They included 
 * liberty to believe ' that our dead may re- 
 turn to us in visions of the night, as we call 
 them, and even that the world we live in is 
 peopled with the spirits of those who have 
 no more to do with its daily affairs. What 
 seems to have struck him most is the anni- 
 hilation of time and space in dreams ; a 
 characteristic which supplies the disbeliever 
 in their significance with much of his in- 
 credulity and some of his ridicule. But, as we 
 may presently see, there is much more than 
 matter of amusement in it without assent- 
 ing to Dr. Radcliffe's (speculative) deduc- 
 tions. He observes that when we dream 
 'imagination at once sets at naught the 
 notion which measures time in moments and 
 space in footsteps, by continually passing 
 from one moment to any other in time, or 
 from one point to another in space, without 
 the least feeling of having made any move- 
 ment ' ; and he infers from this observation 
 that we may be justified in thinking that our 
 
1 1 2 The Study of Dreams 
 
 true relations to time and space are not 
 exactly those which we believe them to be 
 when we are awake. * How is it,' he asks, 
 * that I am at once introduced into a world 
 of spirit in which there is, as it were, no time 
 and space — in which I lose the distinction 
 between now and then, between here and 
 there ? I do not explain the fact by saying 
 that it is a mere fiction of my imagination. 
 Imagination is a manifestation of my own 
 being. Where imagination can be there / 
 must be, in spirit at least. In a word, I do 
 not see how to account for the operation of 
 my imagination in time and space without 
 supposing that I must be a spirit which is 
 truly alive in the past and future as well as 
 in the present, and which is in the true sense 
 of the word ubiquitous. And so it may be 
 that my true relations to time and space are 
 made known to me more clearly in a dream 
 than at any other time.' 
 
 At this point Dr. Radcliffe probably re- 
 membered that Imagination is precisely the 
 faculty whose testimony is rejected at the 
 bar of Reason, That he drew these notions 
 of his from imagination is what they would 
 
The Study of Dreams 1 1 3 
 
 say who wished to prove him unsupplied 
 with trustworthy evidence. Therefore 
 he proceeds to the reasonable assertion 
 that imagination is a creative faculty. Its 
 phenomena ' are utterly unintelligible unless 
 there be in men a spirit which participates in 
 the nature of the Creator so far as to be not 
 only superior to time and space but also 
 truly poetic or creative.' And so (to come 
 to Dr. Radcliffe's conclusion) ' from this 
 point of view you may look upon yourself as 
 a spirit which may be incarnated at one time 
 and translated out of reach of the senses at 
 another.' You are ' more or less at liberty 
 to believe that the dead and living may exist 
 together in a world of spirit in which the so- 
 called living are less living than very many 
 of the so-called dead ; and that in fact the 
 dead may come and go as they do in 
 dreams.' 
 
 A world where the dead may come and 
 go ' as they do in dreams ' ! It is said as if, 
 whatever hesitations there may be in accept- 
 ing the belief that we are in bonds to false 
 conceptions of time and space, or however 
 much we may doubt when we are awake 
 H 
 
1 1 4 The Shidy of Dreams 
 
 that the spirits of the dead are everywhere 
 about us, it is an unimpeachable assumption 
 that these spirits come and go in dreams. 
 
 Now this is the first of the two great 
 superstitions about dreams ; the other being 
 that omens and warnings are conveyed to us 
 by the same agency — intimations of events 
 past, present, and to come, which could not 
 be brought to knowledge otherwise. Dr. 
 Radcliffe's other views need not be regarded 
 here. He is only intended to stand for the 
 few men of education and thought who 
 boldly declare their willingness to accept 
 these more ancient superstitions without any 
 reserve of ifs and ans. But what of the rest 
 of mankind, in a community like our own, 
 for example? It may be said without doubt 
 that hardly one amongst them could listen 
 without a shock to the plain, direct, un- 
 encumbered assertion that the dead come to 
 us in dreams. And yet by far the greater 
 number either believe it true, or half-believe; 
 or, when they are least credulous, are in the 
 asking state of mind that ' wonders ' whether 
 such-and-such things are really true or not. 
 For the shock that we have spoken of is not 
 
The Study of Dreams 1 1 5 
 
 a shock of incredulity or rejection ; it is 
 rather like that which most minds experience 
 when some secret thought is surprised, or 
 when some furtive emotion, concealed for its 
 sacredness, is threatened with discovery. So 
 much may be said for most people, taught 
 or untaught, or whether they be of a religious 
 turn or otherwise. And as for the remainder, 
 the smaller number who are quick to deny 
 that dreams have any more significance than 
 a toothache, it would be interesting to know 
 how quick the denial springs up in the 
 breasts of most of them. For there is a 
 promptitude of perfect conviction — or, as we 
 might phrase it, conviction of primal insist- 
 ence — which is aware of no impediment 
 between the thought and the word ; and 
 there is a second-rate order of conviction, 
 which does not declare itself till after some 
 original doubt has been for the thousandth 
 time swallowed down. Only for a moment, 
 only as a shadow may the doubt reappear ; 
 but reappear it always does before convic- 
 tion speaks, and has to be suppressed anew 
 on every occasion. It is possible to be sure 
 of holding certain opinions honestly, and yet 
 
1 1 6 The Study of Dreams 
 
 to be aware from time to time that every 
 square inch of those opinions rests on under- 
 lying doubt. Such opinions are like the 
 floating islands that we sometimes read of; 
 and many of the kind would be confessed to 
 by sceptics of every variety were they inter- 
 rogated in a Palace of Truth. 
 
 We shall see presently, perhaps, that some 
 of these islands, substantial as they seem, 
 are composed of most dissoluble matter. As 
 the question now stands between those who 
 hold by the supernatural in dreams and 
 those who affirm that dreams are the merest 
 fumes of fantasy, it is agreed that the latter 
 have all the advantage of argument. Had 
 Dr. Radcliffe the genius of Plato and twice 
 his own learning, nothing would be proved by 
 his statement that the dead visit us in dreams 
 except that he thought they do ; just as he 
 thought, judging from the same phenomena, 
 that the soul and spirit of man may be 
 ubiquitous Mn the true sense of the word.' 
 Probably he went upon experience of such 
 visits — experience of such a character that 
 he could hardly doubt them actual and 
 supernatural. He certainly took into account 
 
The Shidy of Dreams 1 1 7 
 
 the stories we all read and hear, in which 
 veracious persons testify to such visits at the 
 moment of death, or to warn of some im- 
 pending danger, or to convey some revelation. 
 But none of these tales bear the strain of 
 proof that science must needs apply to them. 
 The evidence is single; corroboration is 
 wanting ; fortuity may come in ; coincidence 
 is probable, as also the unconscious sup- 
 pressions, exaggerations, importations of an 
 excited fancy. For a matter of antecedent 
 likelihood such evidence would be enough ; 
 but not for unveilings of the future or 
 the apparition of departed spirits to a man 
 asleep. 
 
 To these objections there is no answer ; 
 and to repeat what was said in the previous 
 essay, two things greatly assist in imposing 
 silence on believers who remain unmoved in 
 their belief. The first is a dread of being 
 thought credulous, superstitious, and there- 
 fore weak-minded: a fear which is very 
 effective at all times, and the more so in an 
 age when a perfectly philosophical spirit of 
 agnosticism in a few has cast the general 
 ignorance and shallowness into swaggering 
 
1 1 8 The Study of Dreams 
 
 forms of incredulity for everything but the 
 omnipotence of physical science. The other 
 thing is that it is often quite impossible to 
 defend belief in the supernatural character 
 of dreams without entering upon a particular 
 account of events, relationships, affections, 
 and emotions of the most intimate and 
 sacred kind. The stories that are told on 
 behalf of the supernatural in dreams are not 
 one in ten of what could be told but for 
 the pain of telling them, and the repugnance 
 to unveiling before public view, with name, 
 date, and circumstance, what belongs to our 
 most precious and pathetic remembrances. 
 
 It appears, then, that for some reason or 
 another, most of the evidence on the one 
 side never comes before the judges ; and 
 that what is withheld is probably the most 
 striking. But that it would be convincing if 
 adduced is another matter. The argument 
 from coincidence, illusion, undesigned exag- 
 geration or suppression is very strong ; and 
 the difficulty of offering such material corro- 
 boration as would satisfy a court of law (and 
 it is reasonable to ask for as much) has 
 never been overcome. 
 
The Study of Dreams 1 1 9 
 
 But the scientific genius of the age has 
 more to say to the dreamer of strange dreams 
 than * Prove your particulars : when you 
 have done so we will begin to think that 
 there may be something wonderful about 
 them.' The visionaries (by which I mean 
 no opprobrium) are confronted by a positive 
 as well as a negative account of dreams. 
 Science undertakes to say not only what 
 they are not, but what they are ; and if this 
 explanation be right there is an end of the 
 matter : the case is decided. And it has 
 been a long time before the world, this 
 explanation ; and all the while it has had 
 the applause of the whole army of common- 
 sense persons who either are or affect to be 
 both amused and convinced by it. I say 
 ' affect,' because nobody can doubt that there 
 is a great deal of private reserve in the accept- 
 ance of the functional-morbidity account 
 of dreams ; and I can but think that some 
 who preach it have their secret dubieties, 
 and would acknowledge them but for the 
 fear of seeming to bring superstition into 
 science. As for the amusement which is so 
 commonly derived from the discovery that 
 
I20 The Study of Dreams 
 
 dreaming is entirely due to a morbid con- 
 dition of organic function, it is probably 
 explained by a sensation of relief from tire- 
 some speculation, often of a boding character ; 
 or perhaps there is something really comical 
 in the thought that our most pregnant and 
 prophetic dreaming is only an expression of 
 uneasiness in the stomach. 
 
 It can be shown, however, that the physio- 
 logical explanation of dreams is almost if 
 not entirely worthless ; so far does it fall 
 short of its pretensions. At the best it is no 
 more explanatory of what it is supposed to 
 expound than the following account of the 
 writing of a book would be : — ' A man takes 
 into his hand an instrument called a pen ; 
 he dips one end of it into a fluid (usually 
 black) called ink ; and with the ink at the 
 end of the pen he makes a variety of marks 
 on white or blue-tinted paper. And there 
 is no more to be said about the writing 
 of a book : the explanation is simple and 
 complete.' 
 
 That this is no travesty will be seen when 
 any of the popular-science essays on dreams 
 is examined. They all teach the same thing 
 
The Shidy of Dreains 1 2 1 
 
 from the same imperfect grounds, so that 
 to quote Dr. Benjamin Richardson, himself 
 a great expounder of the laws of Nature, 
 is to cite thie common verdict of scientific 
 inquiry. * Dreams,' said this gentleman in 
 a recently published lecture — 'Dreams are 
 all explainable on physical grounds ; there 
 is no mystery about them save that which 
 springs from blindness to natural facts and 
 laws.' With that he proceeds to repeat 
 the well-known formulae for dispelling the 
 groundless sense of mystery which still 
 harbours in the human mind. * The seat 
 of dreaming,' it should be understood, 'is 
 in the locked-up closet of mental impres- 
 sions, the brain and the spinal column, 
 commonly called the cerebro-spinal centre.' 
 It is there that our dreams take shape ; but 
 to know what they are it is necessary to re- 
 member that ' we have two nervous systems 
 — one our own, by which we will and do, the 
 other Nature's, which goes on with our vital 
 work whether we will or no.' This second 
 nervous system, which serves to keep onr 
 various organs going automatically, ' is 
 centred within the trunk of the body ; not 
 
122 The Study of Dreams 
 
 in the closed box of the skull and spinal 
 column, but in the line of the great viscera, 
 to which its nerves are distributed and in 
 which it communicates with the nerves of 
 the cerebral system which are our own,' or 
 under our governance. More particularly, 
 * the involuntary nerves ' in the larynx, 
 oesophagus, heart, stomach, convey intelli- 
 gence to the brain of any local disturbance. 
 That being understood, we are at once on 
 the track of the true explanation of dreams. 
 They ensue upon certain perturbations in 
 the brain which are not the consequence of 
 action by its own nerve-system (as when we 
 sit down to make a calculation or plan a 
 novel), but are communicated from the other 
 nervous system, in token of local disturbance 
 or distress. (These communications from 
 the unthinking to the thinking part of us 
 may be compared, perhaps, to the ringing of 
 an electric bell in an upper chamber of the 
 house when the wires are disturbed below ; 
 as by burglarious entry.) When these brain 
 perturbations are set up in sleep, we dream ; 
 or rather that is a frequent consequence. 
 Sometimes they are produced by vibrations 
 
The Stitdy of Dreams 1 2 3 
 
 started from outside the body and striking 
 on the senses ; at other times they proceed 
 from within the body — that is to say, from 
 the second nerve-system which runs in the 
 line of the great viscera, and is specially 
 active in the organs of digestion. In either 
 case they point to the conclusion that dreams 
 may be ' nothing more than the common 
 vibrations of terrestrial media acting upon 
 a corporeal vibratorium.' Now they arise 
 from the firing of a gun, the ringing of a 
 bell, a breath of cold air upon a naked foot, 
 or some other disturbance from without ; 
 and now ' perturbation in the richly-nerved 
 digestive organs send vibrating and startling 
 messages from within to the mental centres,' 
 and then we have another sort of dream. 
 And thus the whole thing is explained. 
 Dreams are ' a purely physical phase of 
 life.' They are * all explainable on physical 
 grounds,' and there is no mystery about 
 them to any one who has a fair portion 
 of the knowledge that may be gained in 
 a dissecting-room. 
 
 That this account of the matter has some- 
 thing explanatory in it is obvious ; but it is 
 
124 ^'^^ Study of Dreams 
 
 so little as to be of no importance. In like 
 manner, and to about the same degree, the 
 alphabet is an explanation of Shakespeare's 
 plays. And so if one were to examine the 
 mystery of prophecy, he might conceivably 
 think it advisable to start with a description 
 of the vocal organs and the physiological 
 processes under which they vibrate. But 
 the lecturer who, proceeding to that extent, 
 broke off with a declaration that he had 
 finished with a subject that required no 
 further elucidation would find no one will- 
 ing to allow that he had begun upon it. 
 And it does not appear that the expositors 
 of whom Dr. Richardson is an example are 
 any more conclusive in what they say of 
 dreams. 
 
 No doubt the explanation they offer would 
 be cogent and complete if the conceptions 
 they undertake to dispel were what they are 
 not. The physiological argument would 
 apply effectually to a belief that dreams 
 are of exterior origin altogether ; that they 
 come to us from without ; that our brain- 
 system, whatever its scope or its limitations, 
 has nothing to do with the breeding of 
 
The Shtdy of Dreams t 2 5 
 
 them. If that were the common idea, Dr. 
 Richardson's argument could boast of a 
 comprehensive and finished purpose ; but 
 except, perhaps, in the witless mind of one 
 in five thousand there is no such idea to 
 refute. Every intelligent man is aware that 
 his dreams are his own, just as his thoughts 
 are his own. Physiological instruction on 
 that point is unnecessary ; it is not included 
 in what is asked for ; and to show how the 
 machinery of mind is set in motion is not 
 to unveil the mystery of what the mind pro- 
 duces when it is at work. To pretend any- 
 thing to the contrary is almost as if an 
 engineer should say, ' Here is a steam- 
 yacht, well supplied with canvas. Launched 
 upon the seas, you may view from beneath 
 its sails many strange and beautiful and 
 terrible sights ; some, perhaps, that have 
 never been seen before. But after I ex- 
 plain to you the interior mechanism of the 
 vessel, and show how one part of it works 
 with or upon another to get the ship in 
 motion from the dock, you must not pretend 
 that there is anything incomprehensible or 
 unexpected in what you see on your travels.' 
 
126 The Study of Dreams 
 
 But, indeed, the very terms of the physio- 
 logical exposition inform us that where it 
 leaves off the dream it affects to explain is 
 about to begin. Vibrations of terrestrial 
 media, whether they proceed from a cry in 
 the street or from an uneasy stomach, are 
 not dreams, any more than the breath blown 
 into a clarionet is a tune. Granting that 
 the origin of every dream is vibration in the 
 corporeal system (which in every conceivable 
 case must attend the beginning of a dream), 
 the dream itself is — what? We know by 
 experience that it may be many things — 
 taking a prodigious range of variety from 
 the ridiculous to the sublime, the extreme of 
 triviality to the deepest meaning. But what- 
 ever else they may be, and excluding all 
 possible illusions as to spiritual communica- 
 tion, spiritual illumination, and everything 
 else that imports concession to superstitious 
 belief, dreams are operations of the mind. 
 Whatever mystery they may offer for in- 
 quiry is presented by mind in operation, not 
 by the physical movements that set mind 
 at work ; and therefore the pretensions of 
 ' scientists ' to ' leave no mystery about 
 
The Sttcdy of Drea7ns 127 
 
 them ' after once expounding the mechanism 
 by which they are started are quite unten- 
 able. The physiological explanation of 
 dreams which imposes on so many people 
 for a humorous but complete account of 
 them leaves off before it explains anything 
 to the purpose. 
 
 The secret of this remarkable inconclusive- 
 ness seems to be an inveterate reluctance to 
 allow that dreams are operations of the mind. 
 The endeavour is to show, the effect of the 
 endeavour is to persuade us, that they are 
 little more than physical motions in the 
 brain, like whatever excites them. Dr. 
 Richardson, indeed (and he is only quoted 
 as a popular exponent of the prevailing 
 doctrine) — Dr. Richardson says distinctly 
 that dreams are ' a purely physical phase of 
 life.' By that, apparently, he intends to 
 deny them all relationship with mind ; for 
 no one calls that ' purely physical ' which he 
 takes to be mental, or mental though with 
 a physical cause. But it is evident that he 
 does not mean ' purely physical,' however he 
 may be understood ; for not only does he 
 say elsewhere that ' the seat of dreams is in 
 
128 The Study of Dreams 
 
 the locked-up closet of mental impressions ' 
 (the brain, in short), but he also speaks of 
 dreaming as ' a partial mental activity, com- 
 bined with more or less complete physical 
 repose.' In this, however, there is no addi- 
 tional teaching. It does not in the least 
 degree explain or even approach the 
 mysteries which are said to be entirely 
 dissipated. 
 
 If, indeed, the physiologist could show 
 that the nerve-system to which he points is 
 employed in the production of dreams alone^ 
 his contentment with it as a full explana- 
 tion of sleep-phenomena would be a little 
 more intelligible. But their origin is not in 
 any special and perhaps rudimentary system 
 of nerve-communication. They are set in 
 motion by the common mechanism of mind ; 
 which, be it observed, operates to the pro- 
 duction or the incitement of what we call 
 Thought exactly as it does to the bulk of 
 what we call Dreaming. For the one and 
 the other there is no difference in the start- 
 ing machinery, and no several ways of 
 starting. 
 
 This fact and its significance may be 
 
The Study of Dreams 129 
 
 illustrated in a very few words. We all 
 agree that when the vibratory sounds of a 
 bell pierce through the mufflings of sleep, 
 and act upon the vibratorium in our skulls, 
 but yet not so as to wake us, mind begins to 
 dream. But what happens when the noise 
 is loud enough to wake us quite? Why, 
 then, and as a consequence of the same 
 vibratory action in the vibratorium, we begin 
 to think. The thought may be so trivial 
 that it does not abide with us in any sense 
 or to any purpose, even for a moment ; and 
 the dream may be so unimpressive that it 
 passes just as quickly away. But whether 
 they are of that common character, or 
 whether the dream is full of meaning and the 
 thought an inspiration (we are used to call- 
 ing thoughts ' inspired '), they both take 
 shape by operation of the mind, and were 
 started by the same agency in the same 
 manner. So as to the consequence of one 
 kind of vibratory action — that which strikes 
 from without. As to the other, do the nerves 
 of a distressed stomach never transmit mes- 
 sages of woe to the casket of our minds when 
 we are awake ? And is there any difference 
 I 
 
130 The Study of Dreains 
 
 in the general effect of those messages on 
 the mind when we sleep and when we wake ? 
 If the dreams of dyspeptics are melancholic, 
 burdened with a vague mysterious feeling of 
 doubt, regret, despair (as Dr. Richardson 
 says they are), do they differ from the 
 dyspeptic's waking thoughts? That they 
 do not is the misery of civilised mankind, 
 or the better half of it. 
 
 These facts are very obvious, and, con- 
 sidered alone, they should teach any one who 
 undertakes to dispel the mystery of dreams 
 that it will not do to stop at their starting- 
 point. The lesson which the facts afford 
 comes to this : When, after going through 
 his physiological exposition, the man of 
 science says, ' I have shown you that there 
 is no mystery in dreams,' he also says in 
 effect, ' If there was any mystery in the con- 
 stitution and operation of the human mind, 
 I have exploded it. Speculation ends when 
 you are acquainted with the fact that the brain 
 is a vibratorium, and learn that as long as 
 certain terrestrial media act upon it you 
 think, you reason, you bring your imagina- 
 tion into play, and find yourself possessed 
 
The Study of Dreams 1 3 1 
 
 of something called will and something else 
 called judgment. You are now fully in- 
 formed about all these faculties, their work- 
 ing and their products. If they ever seemed 
 to you mysterious enough to excite wonder 
 and to deserve investigation, you now under- 
 stand that there is no mystery about them 
 at all' 
 
 So exemplified, the fallacy embedded in 
 purely physiological explanations of dream- 
 ing appears prodigious. But it is no less 
 great than it seems ; and that it should be 
 missed by trained inquirers is as much a 
 matter of wonder as anything in the whole 
 subject. Every physiologist who, to the best 
 of his ability, marks out the seat of mind and 
 traces the various communications of the 
 senses with this cerebro-spinal centre, knows 
 at every moment that when he has completed 
 his exposition he will have thrown no light 
 on the mental faculties themselves, nor have 
 followed them by a single step into the fields 
 they work in. And dreams being, like 
 thought, the product of some or all of the 
 mental faculties in operation, their expositor 
 should be as thoroughly aware that he will 
 
132 The Study of Dreams 
 
 leave undone all that he pretends to do if he 
 cannot get beyond a statement of how and 
 where they make their beginnings. It can 
 be said in twenty words that dreams come 
 into existence through the same system of 
 causation that promotes other mental opera- 
 tions ; but, that being said, what dreams are 
 and what they signify is left as much in the 
 dark as before. 
 
 As to what they signify, however, the 
 intimation of the popular scientist is plain 
 enough : they signify nothing. As to what 
 they are, it would really seem as if the 
 morbidity theory carried its professors to the 
 belief that dreaming is so little of a mind- 
 manifestation as to be unworthy of serious 
 inquiry. That is certainly the conclusion 
 that is impressed upon their readers, who 
 are exhorted to look upon dreaming as a 
 sort of physiological curiosity, like the 
 scratching of a decapitated frog when you 
 tickle his sides with a straw. Therefore a 
 word or two more on that point may not be 
 in excess. 
 
 It is true, no doubt, that many dreams do 
 immediately arise from a morbid condition 
 
The Study of Dreams 133 
 
 of organic function ; and it is equally true 
 that all the rest are set in motion by dis- 
 turbance of one sort or another in the organic 
 seat of mind. But, as we have seen, it is not 
 true that their genesis or suggestion differs 
 in either case from that of the most ordered, 
 most philosophic or poetic thought ; which, 
 however, does not mean that every one who 
 dreams is a philosopher or a poet, any more 
 than is every one who thinks. Taking the 
 case of distinct morbidity — as I suppose 
 persistent disorder of the ' richly-nerved 
 digestive organs' would be called — we 
 find that it affects the mind when we are 
 awake or asleep in exactly the same way ; 
 and therefore to write as if the sleep-condi- 
 tions were peculiar is merely to mislead. 
 Dyspepsia does not affect us in the dream- 
 ing state alone with fantasies of fear and 
 anxiety. Bad dreams o' nights are no pecu- 
 liar product of the morbidness. When we 
 are awake dyspepsia whelms our faculties 
 in what is vulgarly called the ' blues,' a short 
 word for a state of mind crowded with vague 
 phantasmal fears, in which (as Dr. Richardson 
 says is our case when dreaming indigestion- 
 
134 The Study of Dreams 
 
 dreams) we feel as if *some terrible black- 
 ness or thunder- cloud overshadowed life.' 
 Obviously there is no reason for insisting 
 on the morbid origin of one set of mental 
 phenomena more than the other : in short, 
 we may reject the word ' morbid ' as pecu- 
 liarly applicable to dreams in sleep. 
 
 Yet the physiological expositor of dreams 
 may step in at this point to say : ' But though 
 the mind is similarly affected, sleeping or 
 waking, by perturbation in the digestive 
 organs, there is a great difference between 
 the resultant action of the mind in one case 
 and in the other. The gloom of the waking 
 dyspeptic and the wild and monstrous phan- 
 tasms that people his brain in sleep are not 
 the same things.' It must be admitted that 
 they are not — exactly. There are differ- 
 ences as well as likenesses between them ; 
 but both likenesses and differences suggest, 
 not that dreams are without significance and 
 capable of teaching nothing, but the con- 
 trary ; and that is the one great point for 
 consideration. Viewed together, the differ- 
 ences and the likenesses forcibly present 
 the question which no mere physiological 
 
The Study of Dreams 135 
 
 demonstration is able to touch ; the ques- 
 tion, namely, whether dreams do not reveal 
 our mental faculties as capable of far greater 
 freedom, activity, and expansion than we 
 are conscious of in the waking state, and 
 whether a right study of them may not 
 enlarge our comprehension of the poten- 
 tialities of mind. 
 
 For it appears that whereas the mental 
 faculties of the dyspeptic in his waking state 
 labour with vague and formless miseries, fears 
 that take no shape, horrors in nebulosity, in 
 sleep they respond to the disturbing cause 
 with far more activity and intelligence, 
 weaving dramas out of the vague and 
 painting 'the terrible blackness and the 
 thunder-cloud' with picture-parable. What 
 does this prove, except that the mind, being 
 under the same excitements or the same 
 oppressions from the same cause both asleep 
 and awake, answers to them in the one case 
 with a vigour of comprehension and inven- 
 tion which it is absolutely incapable of in 
 the other? To his own consciousness the 
 gloom of the dyspeptic's waking hours is a 
 dream-state ; only (to his own consciousness 
 
136 The Study of Dreams 
 
 acknowledged or unacknowledged) duller, 
 foggier, stupider, more sleepy, groping, and 
 mentally inept. 
 
 And so it is if we turn to another sort of 
 disturbance and another kind of dreams ; 
 such as are suggested by cold or hunger. 
 The hungry man awake has his mind filled 
 with emotions which, because he happens to 
 be awake, are called 'thoughts': thoughts of 
 good things to eat. But if we are to dis- 
 tinguish between thoughts and dreams, these 
 are not thoughts. In truth (and the uncon- 
 sidered fact illustrates the whole subject) the 
 habitual occupation of the mind at all times 
 is not thinking but dreaming. The greater 
 part of its employment, its normal and only 
 spontaneous employment, is dreaming ; that 
 is to say, a dreaming which is no different 
 by day and by night except in limitation 
 and restraint. The hungry man, then — 
 trudging across some dreary moor twelve 
 hours after breakfast-time, or lying supper- 
 less in the street after no breakfast — finds 
 his mind haunted with rambling thoughts 
 of goodly food and noble flagons : tables 
 brightly spread in warmth and light. The 
 
The Shcdy of Dreams 1 3 7 
 
 vision changes from this to that, from one 
 favourite dish to another favourite dish ; 
 and that is all that the healthy mind is 
 capable of under the circumstances. But 
 with no greater provocation from a craving 
 digestive apparatus, the same mind delivers 
 itself in sleep of banqueting-scenes far more 
 dramatic, incomparably more vivid, infinitely 
 more pointed and particular than it ever 
 invented in the waking day. That is the 
 true mark for observation ; and should the 
 hunger-and-thirst dream be attended by ex- 
 travagance — which, however, is not always 
 the case — all that can be said is that here 
 is another point for inquiry. For there is 
 no reason to suspect a more essential mor- 
 bidity in these extravagances than in the 
 roving fancies of the famishing man awake. 
 They are the same in character precisely. 
 The only difference is a difference of in- 
 tensity, of dramatic invention and force. 
 The fancies of the hungry man awake are 
 not without some extravagance ; and if 
 there is more of that quality in them when 
 they take the shape of dreams in sleep the 
 excess is not necessarily nor even probably 
 
13B The Study of Dreams 
 
 due to the invasion of morbid conditions. 
 It speaks of — what ? What but imagination 
 in enlargement, and of a wild power in 
 imagination which the waking faculties in 
 co-ordination may wholesomely subdue but 
 yet cannot excite, and would, indeed, be un- 
 aware of but for its revelation in dreams ? 
 
 Since that must be the conclusion, it 
 appears that dreams are as likely to repay 
 serious thought as any other subject of 
 psychological study. Certainly it becomes 
 obvious that in giving so much importance to 
 morbid conditions of organic function as ex- 
 planatory of dreams, the physiologist blunts 
 inquiry in too much contempt, and either 
 exaggerates or is quite mistaken. The truth 
 seems to be that physical pain and disturb- 
 ance provoke the mind to much the same 
 emotions (according to the character of the 
 disturbance and the pain) by day and night ; 
 that there is no more morbidity of action in 
 the one case than in the other ; that in 
 dreams these motions pass into a vigour of 
 invention and a vividness of presentation 
 which the waking mind is quite unequal 
 to ; and lastly, that what extravagance 
 
The Study of Dreams 139 
 
 there is in dreams of this variety may- 
 be regarded as only corresponding to the 
 immensely superior freedom and activity 
 of imagination in sleep. 
 
 But all disturbance of organic function is 
 not morbid, and all dreams are not induced 
 by physical distress. Some disturbance of 
 organic function necessarily precedes the 
 most natural waking from the most healthy 
 sleep ; that is to say, it precedes the resump- 
 tion of conscious thought, with its orderly 
 development of idea, memory, reason, fancy. 
 Certain agitations occur in the cerebro-spinal 
 centre, and we tranquilly pass from a condi- 
 tion of complete mental rest into a state of 
 full mental activity. The internal physical 
 movements that wake us to think are not 
 only perfectly healthy but a necessary con- 
 dition of health ; and there is no reason to 
 doubt that motions similarly suave and 
 natural wake us to dream. Indeed, there is 
 no reason to doubt that they are the same 
 motions. The only difference is, that whereas 
 the process is complete in the one case it is 
 incomplete in the other ; according to the 
 common observation that hours of dreaming 
 
140 The Study of Dreams 
 
 may come into the half-dozen seconds 
 between sleeping and waking. There is no 
 disorder here — no disqualification of the 
 dream of one moment, any more than the 
 thought of the next, on the ground of morbid 
 organic function. 
 
 II 
 
 Without going farther, then, it is obvious 
 that although dreams are as much evidence 
 of mind as anything else that can be named, 
 profitable study of them is at its beginnings. 
 Much has been written about them, no doubt; 
 but always, since the age of Science dawned, 
 in a straitened timid spirit. It is a shy 
 subject, and it is so, very much, for a reason 
 which Science is usually the first to take 
 account of: the tyranny of words. ' Dreams ' 
 has become the most expressive synonym of 
 vain and unsubstantial things ; and when we 
 say ' dreamer ' we conjure up ideas of time 
 squandered in dozing fatuity and intellect 
 smouldering out in vapour. To treat of 
 dreams as a matter of serious consideration 
 
The Study of Dreams 141 
 
 is to hazard the suspicion of being a dreamer 
 oneself — weak, unscientific, superstitious; and 
 hence it is, probably, that when men who 
 are sufficiently impressed with the subject 
 deal with the phenomena of dreams, they 
 seem nervously anxious to preclude the 
 supposition that they are capable of finding 
 in them anything which the commonest facts 
 will not explain. No speculation is tolerable 
 to the scientific mind — or at any rate none is 
 thought safe to introduce before the public — 
 which can be charged with * bordering on 
 credulity.' 
 
 And yet it ought to be well understood 
 that if credulity stifles the mind, scepticism 
 is a kind of cramp ; nor can there be much 
 doubt that it is so felt by many who boast 
 of it as a high sort of freedom. It would 
 certainly seem that an age of credulity must 
 needs be an inferior one, or such ages, of 
 which there have been many, would be less 
 despised by historians. And that we are all 
 in fundamental agreement with the historians 
 is proved at once when we ask ourselves 
 whether we should have preferred to live in 
 a credulous age. None of us would have 
 
142 The Study of Dreams 
 
 preferred to live in a credulous age ; and yet 
 it is well for humanity that there have been 
 such times, and that they lasted long. But 
 for them we of these times would have been 
 so very different, and so very much the worse 
 off in our morals, our intellects, our pleasures 
 and possessions, that one might almost ques- 
 tion whether it is true that no good can 
 come out of error. For of course a vast deal 
 of the credulity of the credulous ages was 
 sheer error. All that went to the belief in 
 fairies, wood-sprites, water-nymphs, spirits of 
 the air, was sheer error. Yet we of to-day 
 should be sadly impoverished without it — and 
 not only in the lingering pleasure it gives to 
 us in youth, in the exercise of fancy it affords 
 us then, and in the literary value of fairy 
 lore to thousands of scholars. There is more 
 than that in the matter. It is certain that 
 there would be much less to say for the 
 human mind as it is but for the fanciful 
 credulous error that sprang up in it from 
 times beyond knowledge. From that source 
 poetry and art and the poet's and the artist's 
 faculties have been nourished to an im- 
 measurable extent. It was not in an age 
 
The Study of Dreams 143 
 
 of scepticism that Saracenic art took root, 
 under that much -better- than -nothing in 
 rehgion and morality, the Mahommedan 
 creed. In Christendom itself when did art 
 of every kind flourish most luxuriantly and 
 spontaneously ? The commonplace reply 
 is, in those ages of faith which are also de- 
 scribed as ages of credulity. The credulities 
 of alchemy were ridiculous, but far from 
 fruitless. The tremendous adventure of the 
 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was not 
 carried out by men of a sceptical turn, and 
 could never have been undertaken by any 
 such persons. These instances and sugges- 
 tions might be multiplied to the filling of a 
 dozen pages. But more to the purpose is one 
 remark in which there is very little hazard. 
 An age of credulity may be described as an 
 age of open-mindedness to the reception of the 
 strange and unproved ; and since that means 
 the action and reaction of the unknown upon 
 imagination, the imagination on the unknown, 
 it is as likely to enlighten ignorance in due 
 course as the sceptical mood. 
 
 For all this, it will be understood that to 
 praise credulity is not my meaning, but only 
 
144 The Study of Dreams 
 
 to draw out a truth of which many need 
 reminding : namely, that even from the 
 point of view of the practical man there is 
 such a thing as wholesome credulity as well 
 as a wholesome scepticism. Either may 
 operate to damp inquiry in the highest fields 
 of human interest. If the one may be 
 carried to excess so may the other, and even 
 to worse results. A very good argument 
 could be made out to show that excessive 
 scepticism in the domain of speculation is 
 more untoward than excessive credulity. 
 Readiness to believe, willingness to run 
 forward to the unbelievable — there can be 
 no greatness of mind without it ; neither can 
 there be much discovery of any sort, even 
 amongst the practitioners of the most plod- 
 ding and mechanic science. Moreover, this 
 may be said, and it ought to have great 
 weight with all who are concerned for the 
 broad and general elevation of the human 
 mind : While there is no such thing as a 
 pride of credulity, there is a pride of 
 scepticism which is not only offensive to 
 every intellectual sympathy, but has the 
 disastrous effect of furnishing common minds 
 
The St7idy of Dreams 145 
 
 with a blighting and oppressive intellectual 
 conceit. Amongst minds that are not the 
 commonest, minds blessed with some clever- 
 ness though cursed with disproportionate 
 activity and self-consciousness, it is capable 
 of spreading with epidemic force ; and then 
 we have a body of sentiment or so-called 
 opinion which sits in mocking repression 
 on much that is more worthy than itself. 
 
 Men like Dr. Radcliffe might call this the 
 true Satanic spirit without being far wrong, 
 and they have only to descend from their 
 high religious speculations to more worldly 
 concerns to show that its influence on them 
 deserves the same description. The silence 
 it imposes, the repression it exerts, the 
 cowardice it inspires, are bad for the whole 
 character of the time it reigns in ; as it does 
 in our own. The courage that a man must 
 call up before he raises from the phenomena 
 of dreams such theories and persuasions as 
 are quoted at the beginning of this essay 
 almost amounts to foolhardiness. But even 
 a much lower degree of courage cannot 
 always be commanded for the discussion of 
 a subject like dreams, so paralysing is the 
 K 
 
146 The Study of Dreams 
 
 fear of being suspected of superstitious tend- 
 encies, and so inveterate the presumption 
 that whosoever would go beyond morbidity- 
 theories and the like intends nothing less 
 than an excursion out of common-sense into 
 the wilds of supernaturalism. 
 
 It is more than probable that this pre- 
 sumption would be neither so active nor so 
 severe but for the consciousness of nearly 
 every mind that it has its own secret weak- 
 ness on the subject ; that its own experience 
 carries it, not infrequently, far beyond the 
 range of the physiologist's teaching ; and 
 that whenever this happens, after some 
 strange vision of the night, it immediately 
 finds itself wandering and wondering in the 
 realm of mystic speculation. One step and 
 it is over the border, and as much at home 
 there as amidst the commonest details of 
 the most matter-of-fact business. And it 
 is also true that when dreams are taken up 
 for philosophical speculation, as by the pro- 
 fessors of psychical research, there is the 
 same predisposition to connect them at once 
 with the supernatural. They are immedi- 
 ately carried for inquiry into that field ; as 
 
The Study of Dreams 147 
 
 if dreams could signify nothing unless they 
 testified to the existence of supernatural in- 
 fluences or such as are generally so described. 
 This is unfortunate. The more rational study 
 of dreams is one against which no prejudice 
 exists, although by secondary processes it 
 may lead into the same field of supernatural- 
 ism ; which, however, will lose that designa- 
 tion in the usual way as it is approached. 
 By many a case we know that the superna- 
 tural of one age often turns out in another 
 to be only the natural unascertained. 
 
 In brief, and again to insist on the moral 
 of this discourse, the first inquiry into dreams 
 should not be for intimations of a spiritual 
 world and our own relations therewith, nor 
 anything of the kind ; they should be studied 
 as rendering indications of mental processes, 
 and above all of mental power. It is already 
 clear enough that there is no reason why 
 the play of mental faculty in dreams should 
 be more unworthy of serious observation 
 than the play and product of will-directed 
 thought. Get rid of the associations of idle- 
 ness, emptiness, extravagance, which surround 
 the word they are known by, and it will 
 
148 The Study of Dreams 
 
 appear that the evidence yielded by dreams 
 as to the constitution of mind, its various 
 powers and their interaction and indepen- 
 dence, is quite as valid as that which psycho- 
 logy draws from the poet's insight and the 
 reasoning of philosophers. Even if dreams 
 are of the nature of madness (which within 
 certain limitations it may be contended that 
 they are) this is none the less true. For 
 madness itself, so far from lying beyond the 
 scope of psychological study, is a very im- 
 portant part of it ; and that for a reason 
 which is much to our purpose. Madness, 
 like dreaming, is not all alike. There are 
 different kinds of madness, from that which 
 we call inspired and that called raving to 
 that which is idiotic. In some forms it is 
 not shown in the decay but in the dis-order 
 of the mental faculties. Dis-order, in the 
 sense intended here, includes the meaning of 
 decomplication : that is to say, a state of 
 mind in which the mental qualities (or some 
 of them) seem to fall apart, taking more 
 independent action. Whatever the cause — 
 which is neither here nor there — this is the 
 observed effect in many cases ; the advantage 
 
TJic Study of Dreams 1 49 
 
 it affords to study is a kind of 'dissecting 
 out ' ; and one of the psychologist's greatest 
 difficulties is doing that for himself by the 
 customary process of excogitation. Dreams, 
 then, should be equally studied, whatever 
 their origin ; for what they certainly seem to 
 do is to decomplicate the mental faculties 
 and present them to view in more indepen- 
 dent action. 
 
 From this illustration it is obvious that 
 dreams come naturally and helpfully into 
 the study of mind, which is ourselves ; a 
 study, too, not only of ourselves as we are, 
 but as we may possibly become. Some 
 glimpses in that direction — speculative, of 
 course, but interesting nevertheless — may 
 reward the student who, putting the spiritu- 
 alist and the materialist equally behind him, 
 addresses himself to such questions as these: 
 What are dreams "i What faculties of the 
 mind are mostly displayed in them ? Which, 
 if any, remain dormant? What is the pro- 
 bable cause, and what the observed conse- 
 quence, of the activity of some faculties and 
 the dormancy of others ? Does any mental 
 faculty take a change of character in dreams, 
 
150 The Study of Dreams 
 
 assume functions of which we are unconscious 
 when awake, or exhibit powers and proper- 
 ties that only appear in sleep? In fine 
 (omitting other questions contributory to the 
 investigation as a whole), what do dreams 
 teach us about the constitution of mind and 
 its potentialities as a whole ? 
 
 Ill 
 
 The interest in dreams being common, and 
 the pretension of this little book being only 
 to convey gossiping hints and suggestions 
 to the generality, of whom the author him- 
 self is one, there is no presumption, perhaps, 
 in offering some advice in the business of 
 thinking about these questions. 
 
 I. — As we have already said, it seems 
 necessary in the first place to interrogate the 
 assumption that dreams are to wise men all 
 alike. We are probably wrong in putting 
 them together in a single category ('only 
 dreams')— nearly as wrong as it would be to 
 do the same thing with thoughts. Consider- 
 ing whence they arise, and remembering the 
 
The Sttidy of Dreams 1 5 1 
 
 saying, * So many men, so many minds,' it is 
 only reasonable to think that dreams may 
 be of very different orders ; not, may be, as 
 different as wisdom and foolishness, but as 
 the fancies of a fool and the inspirations of 
 a poet. They may even differ altogether ; as 
 some that are rightly enough called morbid 
 certainly seem to differ from others of the 
 same kind. For besides the indigestion- 
 dreams which figure so largely in popular 
 dissertations on the subject, there is evidence 
 of another sort, similar in origin but much 
 more subtle and informing. These, too, 
 arise from physical distress, but from phy- 
 sical distress otherwise undiscovered and 
 perhaps undiscoverable. Doctors tell of 
 dreams which embody intimations of phy- 
 sical disorder while it is yet so obscure and 
 undeveloped as to be quite unknown to the 
 dreamer in his waking state, and entirely 
 unsuspected by everybody else. It is evident 
 that dreams of that kind have a speciality 
 which distinguishes them from those in which 
 mental processes are carried on ; as when, to 
 quote an unimpeachable authority, * a scholar 
 engaged in a work of imagination, thinking 
 
152 The Shtdy of Dreams 
 
 himself to sleep at the junction of cross-roads 
 of thought, has often arisen in the morning 
 well advanced on one of them, and inspired 
 to write as fast as his pen would let him a 
 passage or a poem.' Here we have examples 
 of two distinct sorts of dreaming — the one 
 reflective, the other constructive ; and both 
 are quite unlike the rambling inconsequential 
 nonsense which dreaming often is — without, 
 however, being more nonsensical than a 
 good deal that runs on in the same minds 
 in their waking hours. 
 
 And two lines of thought may be usefully 
 followed from the first of these examples. 
 The belief that dreams do sometimes reveal 
 the existence of disease so obscure as to be 
 unsuspected is new. It is almost as new as 
 the discovery, to which it bears a certain 
 resemblance, that a photographic plate ex- 
 posed for a time to the sky will take the 
 impress of stars beyond the range of human 
 vision, with all its telescopic aids and appli- 
 ances. Now whenever some latent malady 
 is so revealed in sleep, it is not likely to 
 be done in the language of a medical 
 practitioner stating a case. That very rarely 
 
The Study of Dreams 153 
 
 happens in dreams. Never yet, perhaps, did 
 the family doctor appear in a dream to say, 
 * My dear sir, the uneasiness that disturbs 
 your slumber is a consequence of your taking 
 into your system a too great quantity of a 
 kind of food that is bad for you.' Still less 
 likely is it, in the case of incipient disorder, 
 that the dream-intimation should take the 
 shape of the same physician bringing news 
 of it : 'I am sorry to tell you that a tumour 
 has struck root in you and will give you 
 great trouble when we doctors find it out.' 
 That is not the way with dreams. Parable 
 is their means of expression. Fable mounted 
 as a sort of stage-play in the mind is what 
 meaning dreams always are. Then what 
 more likely than that they should be 
 mistaken for mere vapourish, haphazard 
 phantasms ? The fable is unrecognised, 
 uninterpreted, and dismissed as the usual 
 nonsense ; all in ignorant contempt of a 
 very serviceable function of mind. This 
 consideration places us on one line of 
 thought. The other leads straight to what 
 has been suggested as the grand terminal 
 point of the whole inquiry, and the one that 
 
154 The Study of Dreams 
 
 should be always kept in view. For every 
 such dream is evidence that the mind is 
 capable of exhibiting in sleep finer powers 
 of detection, comprehension, interpretation, 
 than it is conscious of in its waking state. 
 It can receive and record in the one condi- 
 tion sensations of which it is unaware in the 
 other.^ 
 
 II. — It seems, then, that dreams are of 
 different kinds, and should be studied in 
 their varieties ; when it may appear that 
 if some are merely nonsensical others are 
 informing. With this consideration another 
 is associated — one that we have already 
 touched upon. It is a mistake to draw 
 any sharp distinction between the condi- 
 tions of mind when it operates in sleep and 
 when it wanders in dreaminess w^hile we are 
 awake. The common or perhaps the uni- 
 versal assumption is that these conditions 
 are quite unlike ; whereas it may be ques- 
 tioned whether they are not identical. 
 
 Day-dreams are well-known and acknow- 
 
 ^ For some further remarks on dreams that dramatise 
 the existence of obscure or incipient functional distress, see 
 note at the end of this essay. 
 
The Study of Dreams 155 
 
 ledged as a frequent occupation of the mind ; 
 but how largely the mind is employed in 
 them does not seem to be recognised. The 
 general conception of a day-dream is of 
 something exceptional and imported ; an 
 occasional intrusion, an indulgence, a de- 
 liberate or permitted interruption of the 
 ordinary course of mental activity. And 
 no doubt day-dreams do take that char- 
 acter judged by our own consciousness ; 
 but this, perhaps, is only when we are 
 strongly sensible of them — when they are 
 inspired by some great hope or desire, and 
 cannot be dismissed without a sense of pain 
 which calls attention to them. But a great 
 deal of the same kind of thing goes on with- 
 out arousing consciousness. Indeed, most 
 men who know themselves will assent, I 
 think, to what has already been said on 
 this point — namely, that the habitual occu- 
 pation of the mind is not thinking, as we 
 imagine, but dreaming. 
 
 Thought is the positive employment of 
 the mental faculties, under direction and to 
 some end or purpose ; and it is the same 
 thing when the purpose is a weighty one 
 
156 The Study of Dreams 
 
 and when it is vague and informal. In this 
 respect thought corresponds to physical 
 motion, to the muscles in movement ; which 
 are sometimes directed with strenuous de- 
 termination on a set purpose, and some- 
 times (as when we ramble about the fields) 
 move without conscious direction except at 
 momentary intervals. But in both cases 
 there is direction ; in both of them the 
 various sets of muscles which must be em- 
 ployed for the particular purpose in view 
 are called upon to work in harmony for 
 that purpose. The mental faculties being 
 employed in like manner, we say that they 
 are engaged in thought ; but just as physical 
 action is one thing in serving a gun on the 
 battle-field and another in walking a Marine 
 Parade, so with mental action. There is 
 thought and thought. A great deal that is 
 called by that name would hardly deserve 
 it were desert in question ; so lax is such 
 thought in grasp, so loose of intention, so 
 broken by lapses into what we must call 
 dreaming : it cannot be described as any- 
 thing else, in fact. The test of fatigue alone 
 suffices to bring out the difference between 
 
The Study of Dreams 1 5 7 
 
 this kind of thought — which we habitually fall 
 back upon as rest — and that of the merchant 
 on mail-day or an architect puzzling out his 
 plans. Yet for most of us there are many 
 spaces in the waking day when the exertion 
 (conscious or unconscious) which is necessary 
 for the establishment of any condition of 
 thought subsides altogether ; or to put it 
 another way, there are times when our 
 mental faculties are under no more direc- 
 tion than the muscles of a man when he 
 lies at ease on a grassy bank ' thinking of 
 nothing at all.' At every such interval our 
 minds are in a dream-state ; and so far are 
 we from suspecting anything abnormal in 
 this state of mind that the feeling is one of 
 return to a reposeful, fallow-field condition, 
 which will be disturbed when we rouse our- 
 selves and bring our faculties under the 
 work-a-day yoke again. 
 
 It is on the strength of these considera- 
 tions that I hazard the conjecture — which, 
 however, is more than that in my own esti- 
 mation — that the habitual occupation of the 
 mind is not thinking but dreaming. The 
 chief of its employments, its normal and 
 
158 The Study of Dreams 
 
 only spontaneous employment, strictly 
 speaking, is dreaming: 'that is to say, a 
 dreaming which is no different by night 
 and day except in limitation and restraint' 
 
 To come to that conclusion, if it can be 
 done, is to make some advance on solid 
 ground. To be sure, there is nothing in it 
 that will satisfy those who look in dreams 
 for the supernatural and are content with 
 nothing less ; but it brings dreaming into 
 the domain of serious speculation. What 
 it is in sleep, when it is under the least 
 degree of constraint (exactly as our muscles 
 are) may be compared without fear of ridi- 
 cule with what it is in our waking state ; 
 and the comparison will probably yield a 
 few results for Reason to go upon. For 
 example. One question is, whether certain 
 of our mental faculties are in abeyance when 
 we dream. At present this question stands 
 as purely hypothetical ; the answer being 
 supposed to lie where there is extreme 
 difficulty in getting at it — namely, the mind 
 in sleep. But supposing the dream-state to 
 be the same whether we sleep or wake, 
 evidence on this point may be looked for 
 
The Study of Dreams 159 
 
 in day-dreaming, when the working of our 
 mental faculties do come under trustworthy 
 observation. And what we look for may be 
 found. In day-dreaming we are conscious 
 of a sensation which tells that certain of 
 our faculties have fallen into rest — Will, for 
 instance ; while at the same time others 
 are advanced into far greater freedom and 
 activity. But perhaps the word should be 
 not 'others' but 'one other' — Imagination : 
 Imagination with its tributaries, such as 
 hope, fear, memory, retrospection, and that 
 which is the contrary of retrospection and 
 is rather difficult to name : let us say fore- 
 cast. And since this is our experience in 
 day-dreaming (whether it be specially pro- 
 voked, or whether it be the idle desultory 
 mind-rambling in which so much of our 
 time is passed), it may fairly be inferred 
 that it is also our experience in sleep- 
 dreaming. That certain of our faculties are 
 in abeyance at such times becomes much 
 less hypothetical at any rate ; though it 
 would be rash to infer that they are always 
 in abeyance, and not unreasonable to ask 
 whether Imagination itself is not some- 
 
i6o The Study of Dreams 
 
 times a substitute for them or for some of 
 them. 
 
 Comparison of the two dream-states will 
 bring forward another point, briefly touched 
 upon in the preceding essay. The confusion, 
 the sudden transitions, the merging of one 
 scene into another, the change of one person 
 into another after the fashion of magic- 
 lantern transformations — absurdities, as we 
 agree to call them, which go so far to dis- 
 qualify sleep-dreams for serious considera- 
 tion — are not peculiar to them. Not that the 
 absurdities always appear. Many dreams 
 are as reasonable and consecutive in their 
 whole development as the story of a ship- 
 wreck or a day's hunting as told by the 
 newspapers. But though these transitions 
 and transfigurations are strongly character- 
 istic of sleep-dreams, they are no peculiarity. 
 In a minor degree they are equally character- 
 istic of day-dreaming, as we see in a moment 
 when we reflect upon what it is. Even when 
 the main course of the dreamxing runs on one 
 theme, and that an importunate and deeply 
 interesting one, it commonly takes all manner 
 of eccentric turns, suffers all sorts of inter- 
 
The Study of Dreams 1 6 1 
 
 riiptions and intrusions. It often happens 
 in our day-dreaming that we have to call 
 back a vision that delights us, discovering 
 that it has been broken up and dispersed 
 unawares by some ridiculous inconsistent 
 triviality. The transition, sudden or other- 
 wise, was unobserved ; the supersession of 
 one set of pictures in the mind by another 
 of quite incongruous character passed un- 
 detected. 
 
 It has been said that these changings and 
 mergings are characteristic of day-dreaming 
 in *a minor degree'; but the words need 
 correction, and when corrected they bring us 
 nearer to one safe conclusion from the study 
 of dreams. If the vagaries above described 
 compare in a minor degree with those for 
 which sleep-dreams are so remarkable, it is 
 only because everything in the one dream- 
 state is paler and more feeble than in the 
 other. The correspondences between the two 
 are complete throughout, and (an important 
 point) show them to be the same though 
 with an all-pervading difference. No day- 
 dream compares for intensity, vividness, 
 force, wildness, with dreams of the night, 
 L 
 
1 62 The Study of Dreams 
 
 and this difiference seems to arise entirely 
 from the fact that in one case imagination 
 possesses the mind much more exclusively 
 than in the other. It is seen at work in a 
 condition of freedom and domination un- 
 known to us in any other mood when awake, 
 and in that condition it transcends all it is 
 capable of when working in harness with the 
 other faculties. 
 
 III. — This is something to arrive at; for 
 what if the performances of Imagination 
 when it is most untrammelled are merely 
 extravagant? It is extravagance of power 
 — evidence of potentiality rather, which is 
 more to the purpose for the student of 
 dreams ; and this it is even when the extra- 
 vagance is altogether unmeaning. Power is 
 power in or out of harness, disciplined or 
 undisciplined ; and whatever testifies to great 
 latent capability in any quality of the human 
 mind cannot be ridiculous. 
 
 But the extravagance of imagination in 
 dreams, is it always unmeaning ? 
 
 Day-dreaming, with its near resemblances 
 to dreams in sleep, is certainly not an un- 
 fruitful state of mind, even when judged by 
 
The Sttidy of Dreams 163 
 
 a high standard of intellectual result. That 
 close thinking is the only means of intel- 
 lectual achievement is an error, though it is 
 commonly assumed to be a mere natural 
 fact. The truth is that only in a very few 
 employments of the mind does close think- 
 ing suffice for great results ; if indeed there 
 be any for which it suffices. Even the exact 
 sciences need the aid of imagination, and 
 plenty of it. In other employments, includ- 
 ing the greatest, thought is rather the critic, 
 drill-master, filter, shaper of the thing pro- 
 duced than the producer of it ; while of what 
 we call * inspirations ' in art, poesy, and the 
 like, the best have no discernible relation 
 with processes of thought. They are present, 
 no doubt ; but not, to the mind's own per- 
 ception and belief, as contributors to the idea 
 that flashes in and over it. The finest out- 
 come of the waking mind, everything that 
 is treated as a pure inspiration of genius, 
 appears accidental to the poet or the philo- 
 sopher who delivers it. No doubt it often 
 happens that his mind is in high excitement 
 at the time ; often, but not always. His 
 experience is, he will tell you, that his mind 
 
164 The Study of Dreams 
 
 is quite as often in a state of listening rest 
 and stillness ; such as the earth seems to fall 
 into, sometimes, on the eve of a summer 
 night. But in either case (which is our 
 point) its condition resembles the dream- 
 state in the grand particular that the more 
 sober faculties which do seem to control 
 imagination are in abeyance. And then 
 comes the inspiration, like the flashing of a 
 word from without, and not at all like 
 thought-product within. And this is not 
 an experience known to poets and philo- 
 sophers alone. Great engineers and the 
 like can tell that they have had the same 
 happy moments. Their minds released 
 from study, their mental faculties dis- 
 charged and sent rambling out of school, 
 then has come the flash of an idea that 
 weeks of earnest, organised thinking failed 
 to bring in. 
 
 Now of course one must be a poet or a 
 philosopher, or, if an engineer, a born genius 
 in that line, to have great ideas in any state 
 of mind. It will not do for every reader of 
 this page to say, 'Well, I know that my 
 day-dreaming yields none of these happy 
 
The Study of Dreams 165 
 
 moments ; all it is to me is a lounging rest- 
 ful sort of musing, productive of nothing.' 
 Perhaps he is deficient in the qualities that 
 lend themselves to the production of occa- 
 sional flashes of insight or invention. Possibly 
 the utmost application of his thought when 
 he is most awake yields nothing, or nothing 
 of importance. But supposing him partly 
 gifted, he will acknowledge that when his 
 mind is at lullaby, his faculties all a-wash, 
 so to speak, between sleeping and waking, 
 he often does find matter of considerable 
 value to him in a day-dream. He is struck 
 (the word exactly describes the sensation) 
 by suddenly incursive and unexpected ideas 
 which he feels to be quite beyond the range 
 of his thinking. Hints, perceptions, sugges- 
 tions start up, which are for him what their 
 happiest inspirations are for the poet and 
 the engineer. 
 
 Of course, it does not necessarily follow 
 that our dreams of the night have or can 
 have a similar value. Between the two 
 there may be a fatal difference of excess. 
 A little madness is believed to be an in- 
 dispensable constituent of genius ; and 
 
1 66 The Study of Dreams 
 
 madness is almost certainly (in the general) a 
 loosening of whatever bond it is which brings 
 the different mental faculties into co-opera- 
 tion with each other in the working hours. 
 Some relaxation of this bond of constraint is 
 necessary for mental rest when we are awake. 
 On the occasions when we pass into the 
 condition called day-dreaming it is still more 
 relaxed ; thereupon imagination asserts itself 
 in greater freedom, and then a state of things 
 is set up which very conceivably corresponds 
 to the infusion of * madness ' that seems 
 necessary for genius. And thus the in- 
 spirations of day-dreaming are accounted 
 for. But it is equally conceivable that in 
 sleep the loosening of the bond is nearly 
 complete; that therefore our mental faculties 
 become, in the grammatical sense of the 
 word, distraught ; that then imagination 
 goes beyond liberty into licence ; with the 
 result that, for the time, the mind is quite 
 mad as madness is known to the physicians, 
 and the dreams which are its products in 
 that condition take the same character. 
 
 This is what is meant by 'a fatal difference 
 of excess ' : a difference like that between 
 
The Study of Dreams 167 
 
 the exhilaration of drinking a small flask of 
 good wine and the consequence of drinking 
 two bottles thereof. Although the compara- 
 tive freedom of imagination in day-dreaming 
 may liberate ideas and perceptions which 
 study has no power to evoke, that strange 
 electric quality may go wild altogether in a 
 more complete emancipation from the yoke- 
 fellow restraint of the other faculties. It is a 
 very reasonable inference. The fact that 
 day-dreaming and sleep-dreaming are essen- 
 tially the same is no bar to it ; it accords 
 with the manifestations of the more common 
 forms of madness ; and it entirely squares 
 with the theory (which will stand, I think) 
 that madness is a constant state of dreaming. 
 Moreover, it is a conclusion that will be 
 welcome to the spirit of the age and be 
 'jumped at ' accordingly. Why it should be 
 welcome is another matter. It is not easy 
 to understand why morbidity of animal 
 function should be to any son of Adam the 
 most pleasurable explanation of dreams, or 
 why there should be an uneasy sort of aver- 
 sion from the likelihood that they offer 
 mysteries for unravelment which, when 
 
1 68 The Study of Dreams 
 
 rightly evolved, may show us how great are 
 the capabilities, the latent unformed forces 
 of mind. Perhaps the morbidity account of 
 dreams comforts Stupidity in its narrow 
 house ; being an explanation that anybody 
 can understand, and one that is quite 
 sufficient for the sort of dreams which alone 
 are natural to dulness. And perhaps it is 
 because it flatters the pride of scepticism, 
 at the same time giving to it larger warrant, 
 that this same theory affords so much satis- 
 faction. 
 
 However, we are still at liberty to in- 
 vestigate, and, what is more to the point, 
 we are free to distinguish. That, in fact, is 
 the chief of his business who would make 
 any study of the subject. We agree that 
 dreams are not all alike, and that there are 
 dreamers and dreamers. The one differ in 
 origin and character — (that is to say, they 
 have their varieties in the same mind) — the 
 other in mental equipment. B can no more 
 estimate the quality of C's dreams by his 
 own than he can measure C's thoughts by 
 the same standard. Yet he rarely finds any 
 difficulty in affecting to do the one thing, 
 
The Study of Dreams 169 
 
 well as he knows that the other would be 
 absurd. Where the thinking processes are 
 poor, inefficient, unfruitful, confused, it is not 
 to be supposed that the dreaming processes 
 will be much otherwise. Or, again, a mind 
 may be perfectly serviceable and well-knit, 
 and yet include barely enough of imagina- 
 tion to hold a candle to the other faculties : 
 perhaps no imagination at all, but only an 
 occasional visit from a wisp of unsteady 
 fancies. No order, no significance can be 
 expected from such minds at any time. 
 They have not the wherewithal ; and, along 
 with other unproportioned, inharmonious, or 
 poverty-stricken souls that might be specified, 
 they make up an enormous majority. And 
 what as to the rest ? The truth seems to be 
 that by far the greater number of dreams in 
 every mind are meaningless. It would be 
 true to say of them in the general that they 
 do present the strongest likeness to the con- 
 dition of the mind in madness ; probably for 
 the reason given above. But there are many 
 and remarkable exceptions ; and to these 
 and to whatever they may signify attention 
 should be especially directed. 
 
1 70 The Study of Dreams 
 
 If there are wildly extragavant dreams, 
 without sense or order, others take a 
 course as natural and consistent as an 
 episode in real life. The theory that dreams 
 are always occasioned by mental disorder — 
 (disarray ; some of our mental faculties at 
 rest and imagination unbalanced and uncon- 
 trolled) — seems to require that they should 
 always be disorderly too. But they are not. 
 Many are not. I cannot suppose that my 
 own experience differs from thousands of 
 others ; and not rarely but commonly I 
 have dreams which are throughout as con- 
 sistent in scene and circumstance as any of 
 Mr. Kipling's stories for example. Some- 
 times they are romantic and surprising ; but 
 none the less they move from point to point on 
 a perfectly rational course. The little drama 
 proceeds quite naturally, with no incursions 
 of the grotesque, no lapse into extravagance, 
 but often with slight incidental Defoe- 
 touches, such as a novelist thinks himself 
 happy in contriving to heighten the simili- 
 tude of his story. Bearing every mark by 
 which we say a tale, a play (or for that 
 matter, a shoe or a house) has been 'put 
 
The Study of Dreams 1 7 1 
 
 together/ contrivance is the word that would 
 most certainly apply to the whole structure 
 of such dreams were they the written work 
 of the waking day. And yet we are accus- 
 tomed to think such orderly contrivance 
 impossible unless the composite machine of 
 mind combines its various faculties in due 
 place and harmony to produce it. Possibly, 
 however, that may be a mistake which obser- 
 vation of sleep-phenomena enables us to 
 correct. In any case, it appears from this 
 kind of dreams that if certain of our men- 
 tal faculties lapse into dissociation from 
 the rest in sleep, they must be qualities 
 which the mind can do without in framing, 
 filling in, and adorning with accessory 
 touches the sane and sequent plot of a 
 story. 
 
 Another noteworthy characteristic of these 
 dreams is that they seem to take easily from 
 a store of invention distinct from that which 
 we draw upon, with more or less effort, in 
 our waking hours. The feeling that they do 
 so must be a common experience ; and this 
 observation is carried further by the fact that 
 whereas we have an ever-present though 
 
1 7 2 The Study of Dreams 
 
 distant sense of instructing others when 
 we depict a scene or illustrate a character in 
 converse with our friends, it seems to be for 
 our own instruction when our minds do the 
 same thing in a dream. 
 
 And how far that may go is seen by such 
 dreams as A.'s, which are related in another 
 page. It is possible to call them extrava- 
 gant, but not to discover in them any disarray 
 of the mental faculties, any lack of meaning 
 or even of design. On the contrary, we see 
 in them all that we know of design, all that 
 we know of mind working harmoniously for 
 a set purpose. The purpose, too, is of the 
 highest moment ; and the whole fable is 
 addressed to the comfort and instruction of 
 the dreamer as if from some source of know- 
 ledge or conviction deep in his brain and 
 remote from his command. Dreams they 
 were ; but so far are they from bearing wit- 
 ness to mind in disorganisation that they 
 offer suggestions of an opposite character. 
 They seem rather to testify to a double 
 organisation of mentality — one within the 
 other and capable of what that other is not. 
 Not that I am unwilling to believe that 
 
The Study of Dreams 173 
 
 reason had little to do with them ; that it was 
 * all imagination '; all done by imagination; 
 but if that must be the verdict, what of a 
 faculty which brings meanings into common 
 minds that only the highest genius can com- 
 pass, conveying that meaning with a force 
 and impressiveness that genius in its con- 
 scious operation rarely equals? We must 
 begin to think more of it and its powers 
 when it can do such things ; and it cer- 
 tainly seems to me that to reject these 
 works of imagination as spurious because 
 of their apparent excess, or in reliance 
 on a theory that the mind is always in 
 disorder when dreaming, is not quite philo- 
 sophical. 
 
 Furthermore, it is necessary to ask whether 
 the infrequency of such dreams as A.'s is 
 interpreted in a reasonable way. Compara- 
 tively rare they are, no doubt ; and whenever 
 they are heard of they are commonly ex- 
 plained as fortuitous — an accidental hit in 
 a thousand misses. When all manner of 
 random fancies crowd the brain night after 
 night, no wonder, it is said, if now and then 
 they seem to have some particular and 
 
1 74 The Study of Dreams 
 
 direct application. The objection is mani- 
 festly just, and it covers many instances, no 
 doubt. But two things should be considered 
 on the other hand. In the first place a dis- 
 tinction must be drawn between random 
 fancies and such organic structures as A.'s 
 dreams, or the proleptic dreams of which 
 some illustrative specimens are given in the 
 preceding essay. The construction of a 
 fable in sleep is as good evidence of mind 
 with all its wits at work in regular order as 
 the construction of a fable for the booksellers 
 while we take a walk. The only test of 
 mind in orderly operation is its orderly 
 working to a distinct purpose. Whether we 
 sleep or wake meanwhile is no part of the 
 test, but is merely coincidental. That is one 
 consideration. The other is, that we do not 
 call the rare inspirations of two or three out 
 of a hundred thousand thinkers ' accidental.' 
 Yet it would be just as reasonable to do 
 so, perhaps (I don't know why not), as to 
 cry ' an accidental hit ' whenever we hear 
 of a strikingly significant dream. Millions 
 of human beings spend millions of hours 
 every day in thinking and fancying, and the 
 
The Study of Dreams 175 
 
 most of it is rambling nonsense or its 
 equivalent ; but although this is a sufficiently 
 well-known fact, we do not say of any 
 original idea that comes up from the general 
 welter of thought-rubbish and day-dream 
 waste, ' merely fortuitous, there can be 
 nothing in it.' Besides, we have already 
 seen that the most beautiful and fruitful ideas 
 of which poetry, philosophy, and even me- 
 chanical invention can boast, do come into 
 the mind in fortuitous fashion. 
 
 Proleptic dreams like that of the scene in 
 the hotel garden (see p. 34), must also be 
 taken as strong evidence that if most dreams 
 of the night witness to a disordered condition 
 of the mental faculties, all do not. Here 
 again the suggestion is that these faculties 
 are dual ; that, to use unscientific language, 
 they exist in man's divided brain in a double 
 set ; and that in sleep, or rather in the brief 
 interval of dreaming (which is believed to 
 come between sleeping and waking, and 
 when, perhaps, our various faculties are 
 gathering together for the day's work) the 
 two sets may work for a moment inde- 
 pendently. If in that condition the 
 
176 The Study of Dreams 
 
 dominant faculty in the one set were 
 imagination, and in the other observation, 
 the dream in the hotel garden would, per- 
 haps, be accounted for. But in no case can 
 the theory of disorder be admitted here, in 
 the sense that Maury and other inquirers 
 use that word. Physiology, I suppose, can 
 have no objection to this duality theory, 
 which the physical constitution of most 
 creatures seems to favour. But however 
 that may be, it is a theory that should 
 engage the attention of students of dream- 
 phenomena. The disorder theory does not 
 suffice. After plentiful discussion it is com- 
 monly accepted as the one satisfactory 
 explanation of the whole of these pheno- 
 mena ; but it is certain that some dreams lie 
 quite beyond it, and equally clear that those 
 which do lie beyond it are by far the 
 most interesting and suggestive. Indeed, 
 it might almost be said that they are 
 the only ones that yield anything to serious 
 consideration. 
 
 IV. — But all are worth pausing upon for 
 one thing. Every dream testifies to the 
 existence in imagination of extraordinary 
 
The Study of D7'eams 177 
 
 powers — powers which do not come under 
 our control as yet, and perhaps may never 
 come. Whether they are Hkely to do so or 
 not, however, is one of the points for elucida- 
 tion as we approach the final outcome of 
 a rational study of dreams. The final out- 
 come, because everything in our dream- 
 experience, whether by night or day, brings 
 out imagination as the mightiest and most 
 mysterious of our mental faculties ; and one 
 that we may look to for far more instruction 
 — especially of the loftier kind — than some 
 other intellectual qualities, which seem to 
 hold it in suppression, will allow the pos- 
 sibility of. 
 
 Under the name of intuition, it has, in- 
 deed, found acknowledgment as a revealing 
 faculty, with the grudging assent of Reason 
 itself. And that undoubtedly is what it is. 
 * Intuition ' is an equivoque expressive of 
 some attribute of the human mind which 
 unfolds truths and meanings unattained by 
 thought, experience, or the teaching of other 
 minds ; and perhaps unattainable by such 
 means. The word appears to have been 
 chosen under stress of the idea that nothing 
 M 
 
178 The Study of Dreams 
 
 can be known that is not somehow taught. 
 Therefore 'intuition' seems to signify the 
 inner presence of a teaching which, to some 
 extent and in certain ways, transcends the 
 capabilities of the mind-machine ; and if it 
 does so to some extent, it is obvious that 
 the teaching may be able to go very much 
 further for aught that the mind-machine can 
 tell us to the contrary. 
 
 Many persons will not agree with me, 
 belike, that intuition and imagination are 
 radically the same thing, if not the same 
 entirely. They will argue for the presence in 
 the one of a divine element which the other 
 does not possess. On that point I could 
 compromise, for my part — affirming that 
 there is something that can be called divine 
 in both. But what immediately concerns us 
 is to take notice that, by common consent, 
 there is a quality in the human mind through 
 which we receive convincing and unques- 
 tioned intimations of much that reaches our 
 intelligence by no other means. Further it 
 appears that though according to the general 
 experience of mankind there are limits to 
 the power or the operation of this revealing 
 
The Stttdy of Dreams 179 
 
 faculty, no one can define its bounds or say 
 what measure of revelation it may not be 
 capable of in some minds and on some 
 occasions. If, then, intuition and imagination 
 are the same thing, the quasi-supernatural 
 character which is commonly allowed to 
 it under one name must belong to it under 
 the other. If they are different things, one 
 constituent of the mental organism may still 
 be pointed to which, by general acknowledg- 
 ment, is a revealing faculty ; and since there 
 is one it cannot be absurd to speculate 
 whether there may not be two ; and if there 
 be two they must be alike in this at least — 
 that our other faculties, which receive the 
 revelation without knowing how to account 
 for it, can in neither case tell how far it 
 might possibly go. 
 
 The purpose of the foregoing paragraphs 
 will not be misapprehended. It is not to 
 argue that dreams are, as they have been so 
 often thought, vehicles of communication 
 from other worlds, or even from the Divine 
 Spirit itself All that is left for whosoever 
 chooses to proceed from the clearer spaces 
 of speculation into the outward darkness 
 
1 80 The Study of Dreams 
 
 thereof. The purpose is to dissipate the 
 superstitious fear of being drawn into super- 
 stition — a dread which has long been the 
 most inveterate stumbling-block in the way 
 of a boldly reasonable study of dreams. 
 When it is remembered (I ask) that intuition, 
 whatever its origin and breeding in the brain, 
 is a revealing power, or at any rate may be 
 held to be so without incurring the danger 
 of running into superstition, who should 
 fear to believe imagination a faculty of the 
 same kind? Who should fear to allow it 
 the same function, or to admit that, like 
 intuition, its potentialities are immeasurable 
 by ourselves ? 
 
 In point of fact, we know as well as we 
 know anything of such matters that it is a 
 faculty of the same kind, if it be not the 
 self-same thing. What has been said in a 
 previous page of the ' inspirations ' of poets 
 and philosophers is full evidence of likeness, 
 perhaps of identity. When we speak of 
 Shakespeare's miraculous genius, miraculous 
 is the word we mean. It is an expression of 
 unbelief that his own experience, observation 
 of things visible within range of his eyes, in- 
 
The Study of Dreams i8i 
 
 fcrence by process of reflection upon what he 
 saw, or felt, or heard, or read of, can account 
 for all that is found in his pages. Some- 
 thing unacquirable by any of these means, 
 something that carried their work far beyond 
 their own usefulness in it, must be called in 
 to explain those flashes of enlightenment by 
 which he drew out of darkness a thousand 
 things till then half seen and half known. 
 Whether to call this inexplicable something 
 intuition or imagination we are never quite 
 certain. Now we give it the one name, now 
 the other ; thinking of intuition when we say 
 imagination (though not when the poet is at 
 his highest) and of imagination when the 
 word is used which we understand least of 
 the two. But whether the one word or the 
 other be chosen, it is intended to signify 
 a mysterious quality which, judged by its 
 operations as we are conscious of them, and 
 the outcome when critically viewed and com- 
 pared, hardly seems to be a constituent part 
 of the mind-machine at all. It may rather 
 be fancied an informing spirit attendant on 
 the composite mind-organism of which Will 
 is the directing member, or as bearing to the 
 
1 82 The Study of Dreams 
 
 whole machine a relationship not unlike that 
 of the mind to the body. Just as the mind- 
 machine is a mystery in the body for the 
 wonders it performs there, so is imagination 
 in and to the mind. As the body can never 
 know what powers the mind may be able 
 to exert, neither will any thinker affect to 
 map out the limits of intuition, which is 
 acknowledged to be beyond the ken of 
 thought. And since what is called intuition 
 and what is called imagination have the 
 strange gift of unveiling and revealing, the 
 question is why any one should start from 
 the appearance of this same revealing power 
 when imagination is followed into sleep. 
 What hesitation should there be in acknow- 
 ledging the possibility that it can be as sane 
 a quality in sleep-dreams as in day-dreams, 
 and as truly unveiling ? 
 
 These questions seem no less reasonable 
 when we remember the scope which at one 
 time and another is allowed on all hands to 
 the faculty of imagination. Sometimes the 
 name of it is used with large yet restricted 
 meanings, as if it resembled the play of some 
 internal light in the workshop of the brain. 
 
The Study of Dreams 183 
 
 Sometimes it is a synonym for mere non- 
 sense ; or it is employed to suggest a will-o- 
 the-wisp emanation from unreclaimed marshes 
 in the psychologic interior. But at other 
 times it designedly stands for a gift which 
 the most scientific intellects, and such as are 
 jealous of superstition in every shape, are 
 content to call divination. The truth is, no 
 doubt, that imagination can be all these 
 things ; the same, but of different growths 
 and stages of growth ; of various qualities 
 and degrees ; differing, too, not only in ac- 
 cordance with the mind it dwells in, but 
 also according to mood in the same mind. 
 And that being so, to those who think his 
 cogitations idle the student of dreams may 
 of course concede that an enormous pro- 
 portion of them are confused extravagant 
 nonsense. Of course they are ; like about 
 the same proportion of day-dreams. But 
 though it is admitted that the most disorderly 
 workings of imagination do account for the 
 phenomena of sleep, we are not precluded 
 by that necessary admission from explaining 
 them also by the higher manifestations of 
 the same quality ; no, nor by the highest, as 
 
184 The Study of Dreams 
 
 when it passes into what the soberest call 
 ' divination.' Nothing in nature compels us 
 to distinguish between the inspiration that 
 beams through a mooning day-dream, and 
 one that, being equally fresh and suggestive, 
 unfolds in some dramatic dream in sleep. 
 
 To be sure, if the mind is invariably dis- 
 ordered when we dream — disordered as such 
 investigators as M. Maury, following the 
 physiologists, insists that it is — the most 
 sane and significant dream must be looked 
 at twice. But is it invariably disordered in 
 any sense of the word ? The oft-quoted 
 dream of Condorcet opposes a negative 
 answer, and not that alone : there have been 
 many such. Condorcet solved in a dream a 
 mathematical problem which had altogether 
 baffled his powers when awake. ^ How are 
 such experiences to be accounted for ? In 
 its mildest form the disorder theory is that 
 the mind is incapable of harmonious and 
 therefore effective action when we sleep ; its 
 faculties disbanding and going apart, some 
 to slumber, some falling into a doze, and 
 only one or two perhaps ever quite awake. 
 So we may figure a company of soldiers 
 
The Stjidy of Dreams 185 
 
 round a camp-fire at night after a weary 
 march. But it is a common experience that 
 — as the theory implies— the faculties which 
 are the most necessary for the work of solv- 
 ing difficult problems are precisely those that 
 are least active in sleep. There is strong 
 reason to believe, indeed, that they are 
 dormant altogether. Will certainly ; and 
 Will seems indispensable in study and school 
 for bending the other faculties to mathemati- 
 cal work, and for keeping them sufficiently 
 disciplined while so engaged. And yet 
 Condorcet's problem was duly solved? If 
 so, we must come to one of two conclusions, 
 apparently. The first, that there are dreams 
 in which the mental faculties are employed 
 without disorder ; dreams in which they work 
 together in harmonious combination exactly 
 as they do in a well-balanced mind under 
 the direction of the waking will. It follows, 
 then, that their working in sleep may be as 
 well worthy of respect as their working at 
 other times ; moreover, that strange as the 
 product may be, it deserves as much at- 
 tention — dream though it be called — as a 
 great deal else of admitted and acknowledged 
 
1 86 The Study of Dreams 
 
 wonder proceeding from our own cerebro- 
 spinal centres. The other conclusion is more 
 surprising still. It is that Condorcet's free 
 imagination solved in a flash the problem 
 that was too much for the whole combination 
 of faculties best fitted (as we opine) for the 
 task. We are to infer from his case and the 
 like of it that imagination can assume in 
 dreams the function of other and very differ- 
 ent qualities, and do in a moment what they 
 whose proper business it was failed to achieve 
 by hours of laborious effort. 
 
 Whether such powers are possible or not I 
 do not affect to decide. All that I presume 
 to do is to raise suggestions and fling out 
 hints for cogitation. But judging from what 
 is known of imagination (insight, intuition, or 
 what not) I should readily accept any good 
 evidence that it could go to that length : 
 to that length for example, and amongst 
 other feats. Indeed, the whole intent and 
 purpose of these pages is to enforce the 
 suggestion which runs through them all ; to 
 wit, that no conception of the sweep and 
 force of imagination is too wide to be brought 
 to the study of dreaming, and that its possi- 
 
TJic Study of Dreams 187 
 
 bilities include what is now called miraculous 
 power. The general conception of imagina- 
 tion is confused in detail and erroneously 
 weak in the bulk ; though why it is so may be 
 easily understood. The imposing and irre- 
 proachable associations that gather round 
 the word ' reasoning ' ; the phantasies, the 
 dubieties, the grotesquerie, the flightiness, the 
 illusion and delusion that mingle with the 
 loftier associations of the word * imagination,' 
 conspire to give that quality the lower place 
 which should have the higher in all men's 
 esteem. Yet we are not without knowledge 
 of it as an occasional worker of miracles ; and 
 what we know it to be at its utmost or 
 thereabout should never be lost sight of in 
 an inquiry like this, from which intimations 
 beyond the power of reason to afford or the 
 waking fancy to supply cannot be excluded. 
 Especially it should be remembered that 
 of all the attributes of the human mind, 
 imagination has done the most for mind 
 itself A little thought, and it becomes clear 
 that had mind been destitute of imagination, 
 the several thing called Reason would have 
 crawled like a snail from its beginnings to 
 
1 88 The Study of Dreams 
 
 this hour — at a snail's rate of progress and 
 with a snail-range of circumspection and 
 discovery. Judgment, upon which we de- 
 pend so much, would have been a starved 
 growth and universally incompetent. But 
 that is not saying enough. It is difficult to 
 conceive of judgment in any stage of exist- 
 ence without imagination to inform it ; nor 
 does it exist, indeed — except in a weak, 
 erring, elementary, and therefore useless state 
 — amongst men the most high reasoning 
 who are sparingly endowed with the gift 
 divine. 
 
 Had it been quite withheld, the eyes 
 of the mind would have been nearly sight- 
 less and its ears all but deaf The world 
 without would have been little more to it 
 than so much substantiality, touching no 
 sense of beauty and leaving the brain un- 
 populated by the throng of sensations which 
 puts Hfe at its highest for all mankind and 
 inspires its noblest achievements. With all 
 the rest of our mental faculties, but without 
 imagination, the philosophic and the scientific 
 mind could not have been. The poet's 
 divinations — which are not merely pleasur- 
 
The Study of Dreajus 189 
 
 able to responsive imagination in folk less 
 endowed, but stepping-stones to the compre- 
 hension of the loftiest things — are bestowed 
 by this faculty. And when a man like 
 Newton himself has brought together his 
 calculations, observations, comparisons and 
 the like, they often lie like the fruits on 
 Abel's altar till a flash of inspiration (ima- 
 gination) fires them up into a blaze of dis- 
 covered truth. 
 
 All this should the student of dreams bear 
 in mind ; with the reflection that when we have 
 ascended to the topmost height of what we 
 know imagination can do we become aware 
 that its potentialities may rise infinitely 
 higher: far and far beyond sight. Obviously, 
 it is a reasonable if not an indispensable 
 thing for the student to do ; and if he does it 
 the purpose of these remarks will be achieved. 
 He will not be unduly fearful of admit- 
 ting the possibility that the hints and impar- 
 tations of imagination in sleep may transcend 
 its powers when yoked with other faculties 
 awake. 
 
 And if they can take this wider range — 
 and the supposition is upheld by a vast deal 
 
1 90 The Study of Dreams 
 
 of direct and indirect evidence — what then ? 
 Why then on this long-standing ground of 
 antipathy superstition and reason will be 
 reconciled; and that in a manner honourable 
 to both parties. The ancient ineradicable 
 belief in dreams as conveyancers of super- 
 natural intimations will be justified, not, 
 however, by the discovery of mystic in- 
 fluences from without, but by a fuller under- 
 standing of that mysterious agency within 
 ourselves which in one shape is already 
 known as 'intuition,' while in others it is 
 called by the name of ' divination.' Ask 
 the materialist philosopher to inquire into 
 the phenomena of dreams, and he takes it 
 for an invitation to run after ghosts, — to 
 accompany a grovelling return to the super- 
 stitions of the Dark Ages. It is not that, 
 but simply an invitation to look into the 
 operation of our mental gifts under different 
 conditions of collocation and activity. The 
 inquiry is whether, when we dream, our intel- 
 lectual faculties still work in co-operation, or 
 only sometimes, or never at all ; whether, if 
 some remain dormant while others are alert 
 and observant, which of them do slumber ; 
 
The Study of Dreams 191 
 
 whether the dormancy of some affects the 
 activity of others, in what way, and to what 
 extent ; whether, if the capability of those 
 that are most active is enhanced by libera- 
 tion from the rest, they are always dis- 
 ordered as well as strengthened in that 
 condition ; whether, since there are un- 
 doubtedly dreams wherein all the known 
 faculties of mind take part, while yet these 
 dreams are as first-night plays or first-read 
 tales to him whose sleep they enliven — 
 whether, I say, such phenomena point to a 
 doubling of the mind machinery, the dual 
 character of the various functions of mind. 
 These and their like are the questions which 
 the student of dreams should consider — 
 getting clear of the pride of scepticism, the 
 dread of being thought superstitious, the 
 morbidity fallacy, and also of a sufficient 
 amount of the common indisposition to 
 accept as trustworthy any man's account of 
 his dreamings, no matter how unimpeachable 
 his word may be in other matters where 
 proof is unattainable, or however strange and 
 impressive we know our own experience to 
 be. There is a weakness of scepticism as 
 
192 The Study of Dreams 
 
 well as a weakness of belief, and there is 
 an hypocrisy of both. A careful man is as 
 studious to avoid the one weakness as the 
 other, and a high-minded man to make no 
 choice between the two hypocrisies. 
 
 NOTES 
 
 PORTENT-DREAMS OF PHYSICAL 
 DISORDER 
 
 It is not pretended that dreams of obscure 
 physical disorder are as well-established articles 
 of knowledge as Jupiter's moons. But they are 
 believed in, and belief is likely to extend with 
 investigation. 
 
 Of course the difficulty of arriving at any posi- 
 tive conclusion in such matters is very great, and 
 must so remain. Not uncommonly, indeed, 
 dreams do suggest apprehensions of approaching 
 illness. That we often hear of ; but not, perhaps, 
 till the dreamer has already felt himself ' out of 
 sorts,' and very rarely with an association of the 
 incidents of the dream with the symptoms of a par- 
 ticular malady — as of a growing tumour, for 
 example. Dreams are not studied with that view. 
 
The Study of Dreams 193 
 
 Unless brain disturbance is suspected, no one 
 thinks of interrogating them with intent to report 
 the result to a doctor should they seem to yield 
 indications of unrevealed disease. Nor are many 
 of us capable of interpreting such indications when 
 they do occur \ for the reason that we have not 
 enough of physiological knowledge to work upon. 
 Therefore no story that could be formed in our 
 own minds would be thought worth repeating 
 to a doctor ; and even if the dream did embody 
 certain hints and revelations, it remains ques- 
 tionable whether the doctor, being informed of 
 them, would have perception enough to under- 
 stand and turn them to account. 
 
 But it is abundantly evident that dreams of a 
 certain order do arise from physical distress. Of 
 such are the dyspepsia dreams, so commonly 
 known ; while others of a more marked and par- 
 ticular kind generally ensue on taking this drug 
 or that. The last-named fact is usually brought to 
 notice after this fashion : * That there is nothing 
 mysterious about dreams is further shown by the 
 circumstance that we can produce at will any one 
 of half a dozen different kinds of dreams by simply 
 choosing out and administering one of as many 
 chemical agents.' No doubt this is true ; but a 
 more significant and therefore a more profitable 
 way of putting the matter would be to say that the 
 body being thrown into a certain condition by the 
 action of a certain drug, the mind is filled with 
 emotions and fantasies aroused by that condition, 
 N 
 
194 ^^^ Study of Dreams 
 
 appropriate to it, and testifying at once to its 
 existence and its character. The dream tells of 
 the drug — names it, so to speak \ and answers to 
 its peculiar action in the body. Now there is 
 no more truth in the first of these two ways of 
 stating the facts than there is in the second. Yet 
 there is a difference between them which amounts 
 to this : in the one the dream figures as the 
 physiologist's toy, in the other as his instructor. 
 
 It appears to be all in the course of nature, 
 then, that dreams of even the lowest order, mor- 
 bidity dreams themselves, should be capable of 
 aiding the physician and enlightening his studies. 
 Here also it seems possible to collect evidence, 
 classify, and deduce; and it is an operation 
 quite without danger, since the advantage to be 
 drawn from it (if any) is only that of being put 
 on the track of latent disease. It is not a study 
 which imports the risk of blundering experimental 
 treatment. 
 
 What danger there is takes another shape. It 
 would be conceivably mischievous to encourage a 
 habit of brooding upon dreams as probable indi- 
 cations of undeveloped physical disorder. Yet, 
 from the nature of the case, this danger is incon- 
 siderable. For a single unrepeated dream could 
 not be taken to signify anything ; it would pass as 
 does some temporary unrepeated feeling of un- 
 easiness in the muscles of a limb. It is only 
 when the dream recurs again and again, in sub- 
 stantially the same character, that it can be 
 
The Study of Dreams 195 
 
 suspected of being symptomatic of some physical 
 distress of a kind that is worth attention. But 
 recurrent dreams are not a very common ex- 
 perience, and wherever they appear they probably 
 do indicate the intrusion of frequent or con- 
 tinuous disorder of the physical system. 
 
 By way of illustration, I may add that for many 
 years I have had two recurrent dreams, always the 
 same except in the most trifling details, both ugly 
 and bizarre, and both, I have no doubt, expressive 
 and warning, though of nothing serious. One of 
 the two will not bear relation on account of its 
 repulsiveness ; and in that dream I do now find 
 a direct significance, after wondering at various 
 times over a stretch of twenty years what meaning 
 its recurrence in precisely the same form and 
 circumstance could possibly have. The other 
 dream I see no meaning in yet, though meaning 
 of some kind it must have, however small ; for no 
 such dream is likely to be repeated a dozen times 
 at year-long intervals or more, except as the ex- 
 pression of distinct and precisely recurrent phy- 
 sical conditions. In this case I dream that I am 
 walking in the fields. I saunter along idly, 
 pleasantly, through level meadows, and by and 
 by come to a narrow stream ; the whole scene 
 being just such an one as the angler resorts to in 
 Hampshire. But I am no fisherman, and never 
 think of rod-fishing except as a dull delight about 
 which a vast deal of lyrical nonsense is sung to 
 one old tune. Yet, when I look into the stream, 
 
V 
 
 196 The Study of Dreams 
 
 and see there many good fish gliding, I wish for a 
 rod and a creel. The wish is no sooner formed 
 than it rises to eagerness, for at every moment 
 the fish become larger and larger and still more 
 plentiful. Before long they might be baled out 
 with a bucket ; yet a little while and they might 
 be cast to the bank in heaps with a malt- 
 shovel. Rapidly changing in shape and size 
 from pretty one-pound trout to great-eyed, loose- 
 mouthed cod-like monsters, they presently fill the 
 whole bed of the stream — fill it pile-high in a 
 horrible sweltering heap; which becomes more 
 horrible still in another moment, when the ghastly 
 creatures die and fall to pieces. An unendurable 
 sight, instantly followed by the relief of waking, 
 but not to shake ofi" the squalid terror of the 
 scene for hours after. At intervals of months, or 
 more frequently of years, this dream has been re- 
 peated many times, with no difference of detail 
 whatever; except, perhaps, the direction of the 
 stream or the time of day. And it is to the pur- 
 pose (as my being no angler is) that though 
 I often dream, my dreams are very rarely ' bad.' 
 They are almost invariably as pleasant as reading 
 in a good book of romance or listening to strange, 
 significant stories of real life. 
 
 DREAMS OF ANTICIPATION 
 
 Another example of this order of dreams may 
 be given; one which, like most of its kind, had no 
 
The Study of Dreams 197 
 
 discoverable significance, and yet was very curious 
 in itself. 
 
 One night I dreamt that, making a call on some 
 matter of business I was shown into a fine great 
 drawing-room and asked to wait. Accordingly, I 
 went over to the fire-place in the usual English 
 way, proposing to wait there. And there, after the 
 same fashion, I lounged with my arm upon the 
 mantel-piece ; but only for a few moments. For 
 feeling that my fingers had rested on something 
 strangely cold, I looked, and saw that they lay on 
 a dead hand : a woman's hand newly cut from 
 the wrist. 
 
 Though I woke in horror on the instant, this 
 dream was quite forgotten — at any rate for the 
 time — when I did next day make a call on some 
 unimportant matter of business, was shown into a 
 pretty little room adorned with various knick- 
 knacks, and then was asked to wait. Glancing 
 by chance toward the mantel-piece (the dream of 
 the previous night still forgotten), what should I 
 see upon it but the hand of a mummy, broken 
 from the wrist. It was a very little hand, and 
 on it was a ring that would have been a 'gem 
 ring ' if the dull red stone in it had been genuinely 
 precious. Wherefore I concluded that it was a 
 woman's hand. 
 
 Coincidence. The dream certainly taught 
 nothing, and had no discernible purpose. Yet 
 visions of severed hands on mantel-pieces are not 
 common, and, with or without previous dreaming 
 
198 The Study of Dreams 
 
 of it, few men have actually seen one, even when 
 taken from a mummy case, in that precise situation. 
 Now had I myself rifled the tomb where she 
 reposed from whom the relic was torn, or had I 
 by any means acquired that poor little brown 
 hand to make bric-a-brac of it, my dream would 
 have been pertinent enough. Then it would have 
 made a pretty tale, with a moral that is not 
 unneeded, perhaps. But, as it is, we can make 
 nothing better of it than a dream gone astray. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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