University of Virginia Library

DREAMS AND DREAMING.

To a mere man of the world, dreams may be considered
rather troublesome matters. His speculations,
if a merchant, sometimes depend upon them, but fortunately,
to no very great extent. If betrayed into error
by them once, it is rarely the case that he does not get
wiser thereon—the warning, serving well, as all matters
of experience, to keep him out of farther experiments
of a similar description: and, taking the experience
which he gets by them into consideration, they
may be said to have been rather beneficial to him than
otherwise. Not so with the man who lives upon
dreams—whose life is made up to them—whom they
put to sleep in the day—particularly at lunch or mealtime—and
whom they assist to waken up at night, for
the purpose of building castles which afford no shelter.
Such are your poor-devil poets—the scurvy tribe. To
one of these, they prove an active principle of misgovernment.
They are agencies, passive it may be,
but controlling, directing, and exercising, all of those,
on which he depends for his very existence. I know
some men who live upon dreams, not as a matter of
choice, but of necessity, in a double sense. I don't
know but I may be one of that description myself. I

certainly dream myself, sometimes, out of an appetite,
and, vice versa; particularly when my chop-house bears
upon its tesselated but repelling front, the talismanic
and awful characters, “no credit,” done in the most
legible, and not to be mistaken, Roman characters—a
not unfrequent event, and, for the remedy of which, my
experience in the fine arts—although, of late, a professcur
in the school of Jeremy Diddler—has, as yet,
found nothing. Dreams, on occasions such as these,
may be held rather pleasant than otherwise. They, at
least, with a due sense of retributive justice, contribute
somewhat to silence the appetite they have helped to
provoke. With their aid, I can then calculate, to a
nicety, the relative distance between a doubt and a negative—the
value of a possibility, and the number of
these necessary to the formation of a single probability.
Hunger and thirst, have you ever remarked, beget an
admirable metaphysical propensity; and dreams are
not apt to lessen, to any great extent, the organ of
speculation. This idea, by the way, is not original.
There is a Spanish proverb, from Andalusia, which
says,
or something equivalent—I cannot lay my hands on the
original. It is curious, however, to observe, that a
supper and no supper, in ninety-nine cases out of the
hundred, are productive of the same effect. The omission
and commission both bring night-mare. We sleep
indeed, but,
ay, what dreams do come! You have taken a surfeit,
have you? and in spite of the hourly and daily exhortations
of the Journal of Health against the practice, you
have eaten heartily, cormorant-like, of a heavy supper,
and gone immediately to bed. Perhaps you have not
taken this trouble. We will couple your supposed case
with one of our own, which, unfortunately for our comfort
at the time, was any thing but supposed. You
have passed the night, in imagination at least. The
sun looks red and bloody as he rises. A cursed weight
appears resting on the hinder part of your skull, while
a Parthian soldiery employs itself in hurling heated
darts over and throughout the regions of the temples
and the brain. These are your actual bodily undergoings.
The dreams—those evils which are mental—
are worst of all. If you are an imaginative man—I do
not mean a scribbler of verse—nothing is more common,
than to feel yourself held, by your thinnest and
most gossamery hair, over the brink and threshold of
some infernal precipice, so deep and capacious, that
you may be occupied in falling, a thousand or two
years, before you can, by any possibility, arrive at the
bottom. Some giant—some Passamonte or Morgante,
who,
holds and maintains you, by the aforesaid hair; while,
with a degree of indulgence, for which you express but
little gratitude, your eyes, to your infinite satisfaction,
are permitted to go before your person and explore the
horrible recesses and depths of the deep beneath you.
There you behold, in most incongruous confusion, adders
with green heads and forked tongues; basilisks,
vipers, all sorts of slimy reptiles and monsters, and of
wild beasts, an infinite variety; meant to afford you,
possibly, a free choice in the manner of your death.
You feel yourself tottering and trembling. Though in
other respects, and at any other time, a lean man, you
have now learned to dread your own weight and substance;
and are led to entertain a wish, that you had
not, during the days of the past year, been so heartily a
consumer of the various excellent marketabilities of
your good landlady's good table. At this time, you
perceive that the gruff and insolent monster, who, with
the fiendish grin of an ogre, holds you in this predicament,
is exulting over your approaching fate, and playing,
like a cat, with your mouse-like terrors, before you
are made to feel the final pang, and consummate the
dreadful catastrophe. When you are sufficiently familiar
with the anticipation of the thing, you behold him
leisurely taking a huge carving-knife from his breeches
pocket; always, providing he be no sans culotte—no
highlander. You watch him with an eye, that calculates
to a miracle, the time he occupies in the application
of the wire-edge to that gossamery thing of hair,
which your heart, all the time, wishes were a chain cable
of ten-pound links. He cuts—you feel yourself
going, going, gone. You experience a terrible and an
uncomfortable shock. There are strange, uncouth,
and fearful ringings in your ears—a hideous noise and
clamor around, and about, and within you—a weight,
as of ten thousand ton of rock upon your breast, and a
corkscrew of heated iron, seething and crunching in
your head. Your first thought is, that after sending
you down so hastily, your vindictive and merciless
tyrant has hurled the entire mass of rock down after
and upon you; a conjecture which tends not very extravagantly
towards increasing your comfort or quiet.
You attempt to scream in your agony, but the effort
dissipates in a weak and husky murmur, the sound of
which dies in your throat, incapable of forcing its way
through the aperture of your mouth. In vain would
you move or stir—your limbs fall relaxed from the
effort, as if under the spell of an enchanter. But while
you are yet undetermined as to the precise occasion of
your present discontent or discomposure, the sounds
that stunned your ears, and shattered and distracted
your nerves and understanding, suddenly ceased; the
mountain rolls from your chest, and, although the pain
does not exacly depart from your head, you feel, to a
certain degree, relieved in that quarter.

But, where are you? That is the question. You look
around, and the first thing you perceive—(always supposing
your dreams have arisen from repletion, and a
hearty supper) and the first natural object your eyes
may be expected to rest upon, is your own proper
person, of course. You are on the floor stretched off
at length, rather quietly and composedly than otherwise,
all circumstances considered. The next thing
you perceive, for your eyes fail to take in all these
things at once, is the large family dining-table at your
side, some of the legs of which are civilly resting upon
your own. By an ugly abrasion of your right nostril,
from which the blood still continues freely to flow,
and which you readily recognise and claim as your

own, you perceive that the shin bone of the ham that
rests passively before you, has, upon no very remote
occasion, been cruelly familiar. A large plate, from
which you remember to have eaten an hour or two
agone, has quartered itself in epigrammatic angles
upon the retouched lines of your face—a decanter and
sundry glasses, a further survey has made out to number
among the slain; some utterly and irretrievably
demolished—ground to powder. Over all of these, as
your senses begin to comprehend the various details,
ad libitum, you behold the lean and withered form of
your weather-beaten landlady, who is blind and deaf,
entering the room with a dim lantern in one hand,
and a broom stick in the other, adding to your enjoyments
by a well sustained application of the latter domesticality
to your back, head, sides, front, and so
forth, accompanying the physical development with a
rapid and running commentary of “sis cat,” “sis cat,”
“sis cat,” in a family tone, to which, from repeatedly
having heard, not one of the whole feline tribe for a
mile round, but would have treated with due and unequivocal
respect. In vain do you cry out, “Mrs.
Jones, it is I; Mr. — (whatever the name may be)
and not the cat. Permit me to assure you, Mrs. Jones,
it is not the cat. I am your lodger, my dear madam—
you are beating your lodger and not the cat.” The
good old lady has a most religious respect for her organs
of sight and sense of hearing, however deficient,
in reality, they may be; and continues to belabour
away most unmercifully, until, by a violent and extraordinary
effort, you at once shake off nightmare, table,
and landlady, and bruised, battered, and broom-sticked,
you retreat to the quiet of your chamber, inwardly blaming
your stars and cursing yourself that you were not
there a full hour before. Such, in some sort at least,
is the usual fortune of him who suffers from repletion.
But, then comes the opposite extreme. The absence
of enough, even worse than the presence of too much,
begets its own degree of miserable acuteness. “A
hungry man,” says Butler, “is very like unto a famished
wolf.” He is right; the creature is a beast
and a wild one. Incapable, half the time, of determining
how long the domestic territory may remain unoccupied;
an intelligent and cruelly speculative imagination
comes in to co-operate with the vulture, the
gnawings of which render you gaunt and spiritless, yet
furious and savage. But there is quite too much reality,
too much nature in the matter, to need or receive,
for the purposes of comment, much aggravation
from one's dreams. It is too certain and too homely
a truth. It will not require to be computed by the
rule of three. It is a horrible state of vacuity, and
we'll have no more of it.

Nothing, after all, is so dreadful in dreaming, as the
breaking off from sudden fright, or awakening in the
very middle of your mystery. Devil take the fractions,
and a fig for the figment, say I, with the Spanish barber
of Seville. In the very midst of good fortune, to open
your unfortunate eyes to lose that, which, with eyes
shut, your active senses have been able to discern and
compass. This is an enlightenment with a vengeance!
The sun becomes any thing but metaphorically dark;
and your only remedy and hope for the renewal of your
luck, lies in your being able again to lose your sight—that

is to say, to fall asleep as speedily as may be possible.
We can well imagine—imagine, did we say? egad, we
know, to our sorrow, the excessive labour of an effort to
re-dream ourselves into fortune. Have we not beheld
the buried and hidden treasures of the pre-adamites;
and with the assistance of Aladdin's lamp, looked over
into those glowing heaps of glittering and resplendent
gems, the possession of which, could they be appreciated
without, might almost compensate the most curious
for every visual darkness? Frequently has it been our
lot, after toiling through the day, and at midnight, sinking
to our couch and chamber exhausted and prostrate,
to enjoy towards morning some blessed dream of fairy
land—while thousands of the tiny creatures, all in
green, were busily employed in amassing its golden
treasures, incomputable piles of which were at once
within our grasp; wealth without limit or compass lay
before us, luring us into that seductive but momentary
feeling of happiness, which departed with the glittering
but delusive fancy that produced it. How sweet not
to have slept—not to have awakened. How many
dreams of another kind are there from which it had
been a pleasure, almost beyond the faculty of the
choicest vision to afford, never to have awakened.

But a truce to our dreams. Queen Mab has been
with us, and is with us no longer. All the fairy tribe,
from the goblin of indigestion, the Gobbleton Mowbray
of imagination, down to the shadowy pigmy of
famine and non-consumption, have departed, and it
boots us not to speculate upon the absent. Our daydreams—a
species similarly troublesome, have their
agencies likewise; but of them we say nothing. They

have a more earthly, dollar and cent, and far less spiritual
likeness. They are evokable in the shapes of
bread, beef, beer, and other condiments. Of these we
shall speak hereafter. We shall meet at Philippi!
When Jim Taylor was carried to jail by the deputy,
on some cruel suspicions which went greatly to affect
his credit, he barely and briefly soliloquised, “I guessed
how it would be, from what I seed last night.” Jim
had been troubled with dreams, and the insolvent
debtor's act gave him an opportunity of rendering to
his creditors a schedule of them. By this he had more
than enough for the payment of all his debts. He had
dreamed, like other specious gentlemen, but when his
tailor refused to credit, Jim's dreams proved unavailable.
A voyage of discovery, fitted out under his assignment,
failed to discover the land of Nod, in which
his property lay. In terra firma he was equally unfortunate,
and like his part biographer, he became a
notorious chronicler of the unsubstantials; wrote for
the lady public, as we do; but, unlike ourself, and
here all comparison ends, through the liberality of
reader and publisher, was soon put beyond all farther
necessity to dream.