Part I

It is now again necessary, at the beginning of this chapter, that I should make something that is in the nature of what they call in Parliament a "personal explanation," not at all because it can have any interest on that account, but in order to show how it is that I am able to offer to the reader the many opinions and illustrations of the commoner kinds of dreams which seem to me to give this chapter a special value - a value that it scarcely could have if it were all the work of one hand, and certainly could not have if it were all the work of my hand. More than a year ago I wrote in Longmans Magazine an article which I headed "A First Essay in Dreams "; and by way of explaining the object of that first essay and its results, I perhaps can do no better than quote the essay itself, by kind permission of the publishers, virtually in ex - tenso, rejecting only such parts as are not appropriate to the volume form or that treat of questions discussed elsewhere in the book.

By way of putting the.reader into a position to understand what it is all about - a position more or less essential to his comfort - let us begin straight away with a category of the most universal and frequent classes of dreams, so far as my little knowledge goes. There is: -

1. The falling dream - you are falling over a precipice or down the stairs.

2. The flying dream - the dream that you can fly -

3. The dream of more or less inadequate clothing - that you are not properly clothed

4. The dream of not being able to get away from some beast, or injurious person or thing, that is pursuing you.

5. The dream of being drawn irresistibly to some dangerous place, such as a fire.

6. The dream that some darling wish has been gratified.

7. The dream of being about to go a journey, and being unable to get your things into your trunks, etc.

No doubt there are a great many more. The list could probably be lengthened considerably. That is why it is that I called this a first essay, in the hope that many people might supply much new material for a second essay. In a rough and ready way, and so far as a plain man's ignorance might permit, I tried to jot down the classes according to the relative frequency of the dreams. In this respect one has to make a distinction, for whereas one kind of dream may happen to be dreamt very often by the same person, and so have a claim to frequent occurrence, another kind may be dreamt by the same person only once or twice within his remembrance, but may happen to have been dreamt by a great many persons. It is the latter kind of frequency that is most interesting, and ought to be significant, if only we could tell what its significance is. For it is an obvious inference that, if the same dream has occurred to very many people, it is likely to have had a common cause in each case, or, at least, in most of the cases. The natural comment on this would be that if we find the same dream occurring to a great many, the probability is that it is a recollection of an incident common in the life of a great many.

But, in answer to this very obvious theory, it is to be observed that the first case of all, which I conceive to be the most frequent, is scarcely an instance of an incident common to the lives of a great many; for the falling over a precipice is not the sort of thing that happens more than once, at all events, in the lives of any but a very few. So the common cause is probably not quite so simple or obvious as this, and as to what it may be, one must still leave the world to conjecture. The only even probable inference is that a common cause exists. Its nature is hardly to be guessed.

The cause of the other kind of frequency is perhaps equally obscure, but less interesting, for it is comparatively easy to suppose that a certain person should often suffer certain emotions or sensations that would be likely to produce a repetition of the same dream in a person of his temperament That the same dream should repeat itself with persons of all kinds of temperaments is far more singular.

There are those who declare that they never dream at all; but in order to understand what they mean by this it is necessary to understand what dreaming itself actually means. Dreaming does not merely mean, in the correct sense of the term, that the mind is carrying on some kind of operations during sleep, but also that on awaking it should retain a consciousness of what it was thinking about during sleep. And in this regard it is to be observed, that when we are suddenly awakened, it always seems to most of us as if we had been awakened out of a dream that is exceedingly vivid for the immediate moment It is one of the most notable features of dreams that they vanish very quickly from our recollections a few minutes after we have thus been awakened, and we strive in vain to regain our grasp of what our mind had been doing while we were asleep. On the other hand, if the awakening has been gradual, it is probable that, in the leisurely process of the mind's reviving interest to the things of waking life, it unconsciously loses its grasp of what it had been doing in the sleeping state.

From this it would seem likely that those who declare that they never dream, do not really differ from the great majority of us who are dreamers by any difference of the operations of the mind while they are asleep, but rather that they are either slow in awaking, so that the mind loses remembrance of what it had been doing while they slept, or else that they lose their remembrance more quickly than most, owing to some differ ence of mental constitution. It would perhaps be curious to observe whether those who say they do not dream have any special characteristics in common, which would serve to explain this. The entire subject thus raised, of the mind's remembrance of its experiences, is a curious and interesting one. The common case of temporarily forgetting a name, which we painfully search for in vain, until it suddenly flashes across us while we are thinking of something quite different, is familiar enough, and yet more singular is the ultimate success in recalling a melody, of which all or part has escaped us and evaded us for a long while.