The Philosophy of Mystery

Astr. I will no longer hesitate to grant that the dream occurs in the moment of departing or returning consciousness. Still, are you not reversing the order of these phenomena? may not the excitement of vague ideas in the mind be, itself, the cause of waking, and not the consequence of slumber, or half-sleep?

Ev. I believe not, except the sensibility of the body be influenced by touch, or sound, or by oppressive congestions of blood in the brain, causing that state of disturbance which reduces sound sleep to slumber; as in the instance of “Night-mare,” which is to the mind what sensation is to the body, restoring it to a state of half-consciousness, essential to that sort of dreaming, in which we make a painful effort to relieve, and at last awake.

Cast. Mara, by my fay! the night-spectre of Scandinavia; that evil spirit of the Runic theology, who weighed upon the bosom, and bereaved her victims of speech and motion: that oppressive dream, therefore, termed Hag-ridden, or, in the Anglo-Saxon, Elf-siderme. Is it not she, of whom it is written, —

Sound sleep will often be broken by pain or uneasiness occurring in a particular part of the body; the dream will then often bear an instructive reference to the seat and nature of such pain. If cramp has attacked any of the limbs, or the head has been long confined back, the dream may be enlivened by some analogous tortures in the dungeon of the Inquisition; and it is curious, that a waking wish for some relief from unpleasant sensations will be re-excited in the dream,—a dreamy fulfilment. Captain Back, during one of the Arctic expeditions, when nearly in a state of starvation, often dreamed of indulging in a delicious repast. And Professor Stewart thus writes,—“I have been told by a friend, that, having occasion to apply a bottle of hot water to his feet, he dreamed that he was making a journey to the top of Mount Ætna, and that he found the heat of the ground insupportable. Another, having a blister applied to the head, dreamed that he was scalped by a party of Indians.”

Holcroft had been musing on the probabilities of life and death, and one night went in pain to bed. He dreamed his body was severed above his hips, and again joined in a surprising manner. He was astonished to think he was alive, and afraid of being struck, lest the parts should be dissevered.

In other cases, we have the double touch, as it is termed; dreams of forcible detention occur, and the sleeper has found that he had with one hand tightly grasped the other. If this hand had been moved in sleep unconsciously, the dream, no doubt, would have been essentially changed. And thus we have all the phenomena realised, which Shakspere has referred to in the visitations of his incorrigible Mab.

As in some persons, by submitting the body to certain impressions during sleep, associated dreams may be produced at pleasure; so if the body or legs hang over the side of a bed, we may instantly dream of falling from a precipice: and it is curious that, under these illusions, we awake when we are past hope and our despair is at its height: in falling, at the moment we are about to be dashed to atoms; and, in drowning, when the last bubbles are gurgling in the throat.

Sounds also may be partly associated with the dream at waking, and with reality, when awake. Under this illusive impression, even murder has been innocently committed, on one, who waked, and stabbed his brother at the moment he was dreaming of assassins.

Cast. And so may be explained, I suppose, this funny anecdote. A young lover was drooping into a day-dream, while sitting with his brothers and sisters, and his thought had turned on the cruelty of his mistress. He was for a moment dreaming of her, when pussy, stretching her paws, scratched his leg with a claw: there was an instant association, I presume, of the wound with the lady’s cruelty, for he started and exclaimed, “Oh Arabella, don’t!”

Ev. Hippocrates quaintly alludes to the dreaming about seas and lakes as an indication of hydrothorax; and to others, as symptomatic of effusion on the brain: and it has been asserted, that gloomy dreams in fevers indicate danger. But all this is hypothesis; indeed, the delirious dreams of fever are often bright and cheerful.

The “Opium-Eater” has a strange fancy regarding his dreams of “silvery expanses of water;” “these haunted me so much, that I feared that some dropsical state or tendency of the brain, might thus be making itself objective, and the sentient organ project itself as its own object.” I hope you understand this, Astrophel—I do not.

In the morbid condition of hypochondriasis, which is a sort of permanent daymare, similar fancies are excited. Esquirol’s patient at Notre Dame thought the pope held council in her belly;—her intestines were found closely adherent together. Another monomaniac thought the devil had stretched a cord across her stomach;—her heart was adherent to its bag. Another believed that her body was stolen by the devil;—she was in reality paralytic, and insensible to blows or pricking.

To explain some of these illusions, Jason Pratensis very gravely asserts, that “the devil being a slender incomprehensible spirit, can easily insinuate and wind himself into human bodies, and, cunningly couched in our bowels, terrify our souls with fearful dreams.”

I may add that we see, in some, a delirious transmigration of sensation. Parkinson relates these cases. One referred his own sensation to others, telling his nurse that his visitors were hungry, while his own voracity plainly indicated that the hunger was in himself. Another, in a fit of intoxication, insisted on undressing all his family, as they were drunk, and could not do it themselves.

Now we certainly move ourselves unconsciously in our sleep as a relief from painful positions. If, however, these uneasy sensations are increased from stagnant blood about the heart and lungs, the oppression is extreme, and loads the moving powers; producing a transient agony and an intense effort. If this were unsuccessful on the limbs and speech, the result would be often destructive.

Polidori, the author of the “Vampire,” was a prey to night-mare; he died with a laudanum bottle in his bed. And Coleridge might have thus left a sad and pointed moral; blazoning his wretched suicide to that world, which unconsciously has pored with a thrill of admiration over those fruits of his delinquency, the romantic and unearthly stories of Christabel and the Ancient Mariner.

The grand feature of night-mare, then, is impediment: but how can I record all its varieties of miserable struggles; of attacks and manglings from wild monsters: of the rolling of mountains on the heart: or the unhallowed embraces of a witch?

The young lady who reads mythology, will fancy herself a syrinx, and struggle to escape from the amorous clutches of Pan. If we have been thinking of Chamouni and her giant peaks of snow, we may be overwhelmed in our sleep by the fall of an avalanche; or we may be dashed off a precipice, and feel ourselves falling into interminable space without a hope of resting.

A lady whom I know, and who is a frequent subject of night-mare, is very uniform in this dreamy occupation. She is shaken to and fro in her bed by fiends, and the process seems to her to occupy considerable time. And there are many who are tortured by the feeling that they are buried alive, and attempt to cry out, and beat against their coffin-lid in vain. Aurelian writes, that the epidemics in Rome were premonished by incubus.

“A battalion of French soldiers, during the toils and dangers of a campaign, were marching on a certain point on a most oppressive day, and at double the usual speed; their strength was eight hundred men, all hardy, seasoned, and courageous; careless of danger, despising the devil, and little occupied with the thoughts of ghosts and phantasmagoria. On the night of the occurrence in question, the battalion was forced to occupy a narrow and low building at Tropœa, barely calculated to accommodate three hundred persons. Nevertheless, they slept; but, at midnight, one and all were roused by frightful screams issuing from all quarters of the house; and to the eyes of the astonished and affrighted soldiers appeared the vision of a huge dog, which bounded in through the window, and rushed with extraordinary heaviness and speed over the breasts of the spectators. The soldiers quitted the building in terror. Next night, by the solicitations of the surgeon and chef-de-bataillon, who accompanied them, they again resumed their previous quarters. ‘We saw,’ says the narrator, ‘that they slept. We watched the arrival of the hour of the preceding panic, and midnight had scarcely struck when the veteran soldiers, for the second time, started to their feet. Again they had heard the supernatural voices, again the visionary hound had bestrode them to suffocation. The chef-de-bataillon and myself heard or saw nothing of these events.’ ”

There can scarcely be imagined a more terrific feeling than this sense of extreme danger, or difficulty, this intense impediment, without a power to avert it. The constant labour of Sisyphus, with his rolling-down stone, and the punishment of Tantalus, would yield in severity to the agony of night-mare, but for its transient existence.