CHARACTERISTICS OF DREAMS.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3204, 5 October 1881, Page 4

CHARACTERISTICS OF DREAMS.

I will give a simple illustration of this lyrical type of dream. A little girl of about four years and three-quarters went with hey parents to Switzerlnnd. On their way she was taken to the cathedral of Strasburg, and saw the celebrated clock strike, and the figures of the apostles come out, &c. In Switzerland she stayed at Gimmelwald, near Murren, opposite a fine mass ot snowy mountains. One morning she told her father that she had had " such a lovely dream." She fancied she was on the snowpeaks with her nurse, and walked on to the sky. There came out of the sky "such beautiful things," just like the figures of the clock. The vision of celestial things was clearly clue to the fact that both the clock and the snow-peaks touching the blue sky had powerfully excited her imagination, filling her with much the same kind of emotion, namely, wonder, admiration, and longing to reach an inaccessible height. Our feelings commonly have a gradual rise and fall, and the organic sensations which bo often constitute the emotional basis of our lyrical dreams generally have stages of increasing intensity. Moreover, such a persistent ground feeling becomes reinforced by the images whiph it sustains in consciousness. 'Hence, ti certain crescendo character in our emotional dreams, or a gradual rise to some culminating point or climax. This phase of dream can be illustrated from the experience of the same little girl. When just five years old she was staying at FTampstead, near a church which struck the hours somewrat loudly. One morninjj she related the following dream to her father (I use her own language). The bigrgest bells in the world were ringing ; when this was over the earth and houses began to tumble to pieces; all the seas, rivers., and ponds flowed together, and covered all the land with black water, as deep as in the sea where the ships sail; people were drowned ; she herself flew above the water, rising and falling, fearing to fall in ; she then saw her mamma drowned, and at last flew home to tell her papa. The gradual increase of alarm and distress expressed in this dream, having its probable cause in the cumulative effect of thedisturbing sound of the church bells, must be patent to all. The following rather comical dream illustrates quite as clearly the growth of a feeling of irritation and vexation, probably connected with the development of some slightly discomposing organic sensation. I dreamt I was unexpectedly called on to lecture to a class of young women on Herder. I began hesitatingly, with some vague generalities about the Augustan age of German literature, referring to the three well-known names of Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe. Immediately my sister, who suddenly appeared in the class took me up, and said she thought there was a fourth distinguished name belonging to this period. I was annoyed at the interruption, but said, with a feeling of triumph, ' 1 suppose you mean Wieland ?" urd then appealed to the class whether there were not twenty persons who knew the names I had mentioned to one who knew Wieland's name. '! hen the class became generally disorderly. IVJy feeling of embarrassment gained in dep'h. Finally, as a climax, several quite young girls, about ten years and less, came and joined the class. The dream broke off abruptly as I was in the act of taking these children to the wife of an old college tutor, to protest against their admission. It is worth nothing, perhaps, that in this evolution of feeling; in dreuming the quality of emotion may vary within certain limits. <'ne shade of feeling may be followed by another and and kindred shade, so that the whole dream still preserves a degree, though a less obvious degree, of emotional unity. Thus, for example, a lady friend of mine once dreamt that she was in church, listening to a well-known novelist, of the more earnest sort, preaching. A wounded soldier was brought in to be shot, because he was mortally wounded, and had distinguished himself by his bravery. He was then shot, but not killed, and, rolling over in agony, exclaimed, " How long ?" The development of an extreme emotion of horror out of the vague feeling of awe which is associated with a church gives a curious interest to this dream. —Illusions, a Psychological Study, by James Sully