Escape, and Other Essays by Arthur Christopher Benson (ebook reader online TXT) 📕

has the sense that one is inventing and controlling the incidents. In dreams this sense of proprietorship is utterly lost; one seems to have no power over the inventive part of the mind; one can only helplessly follow its lead, and be amazed at its creations. And yet, sometimes, in a dream of tragic intensity, as one begins to awake, a third person seems to intervene, and says reassuringly that it is only a dream. This intervention seems to disconcert the inventor, who then promptly retires, while it brings sudden relief to the timid and frightened observer. It would seem then that the rational self reasserts itself, and that the two personalities, one of which has been creating and the other observing, come in like dogs to heel.

Another very curious part of dreams is that they concern themselves so very little with the current thoughts of life. My dreams are mostly composed, as I have said, of landscapes, ceremonies, conversations, sensational adventures, muddling engagements. When I was a schoolmaster, I seldom dreamed of school; now that I am no longer a schoolmaster, I do sometimes dream of school, of trying to keep order in immense classrooms, or hurrying about in search of my form. When I had my long and dreary illness, lasting for two years, I invariably had happy dreams. Now that I am well again, I often have dreams of causeless and poignant melancholy. It is the rarest thing in the world for me to be able to connect my dreams with anything which has recently happened; I cannot say that marvellous landscapes, ceremonies, conversations with exalted personages, sensational incidents, play any considerable part in my life; and yet these are the constituent elements in my dreams. The scientific students of psychology say that the principal stuff of dreams seems to be furnished by the early experience of life; and when they are dealing with mental ailments, they say that delusions and obsessions are often explained by the study of the dreams of diseased brains, which point as a rule either to some unfulfilled desire, or to some severe nervous shock sustained in childhood. But I cannot discern any predominant cause of my own elaborate visions; the only physical cause which seems to me to be very active in producing dreams is if I am either too hot or too cold in bed. A sudden change of temperature in the night is the one thing which seems to me quite certain to produce a great crop of dreams.

Another very curious fact about my dreams is that I am wholly deserted by any moral sense. I have stolen interesting objects, I have even killed people in dreams, without adequate cause; but I am then entirely devoid of remorse, and only anxious to escape detection. I have never felt anything of the nature of shame or regret in a dream. I find myself anxious indeed, but fertile in expedients for escaping unscathed. On the other hand, certain emotions are very active in dreams. I sometimes appear to go with a brother or sister through the rooms or gardens of a house, which on awaking proves to be wholly imaginary, and recall with my companion all sorts of pathetic and delightful incidents of childhood which seem to have taken place there.

Again, though much of my life is given to writing, I hardly ever find myself composing anything in a dream. Once I wrote a poem in my sleep, a curious Elizabethan lyric, which may be found in the Oxford Book of Verse, called "The Phoenix." It is not the sort of thing that I have ever written before or since. It came to me on the night before my birthday, in 1891, I think, when I was staying with a friend at the Dun Bull Hotel, by Hawes Water in Westmorland. I scribbled the lyric down on awaking. I afterwards added a verse, thinking the poem incomplete. I published it in a book of poems, and showed the proof to a friend, who said to me, pointing to the added stanza: "Ah, you must omit that stanza--it is quite out of keeping with the rest of the poem!"

But this is a quite unique experience, except that I once dreamed I was present at a confirmation service, at which a very singular hymn was sung, which I recollected on waking, and which is far too grotesque to write down, being addressed, as it was, to the bishop who was to perform the rite. At the time, however, it seemed to me both moving and appropriate.

It is often said that dreams only take place either when one is just going to sleep or beginning to awake. But that is not my experience. I have occasionally been awakened suddenly by some loud sound, and on those occasions I have come out of dreams of an intensity and vividness that I have never known equalled. Neither is it true in my experience that dreamful sleep is unrefreshing. I should say it was rather the other way. Profound and heavy sleep is generally to me a sign that I am not very well; but a sleep full of happy and interesting dreams is generally succeeded by a feeling of freshness and gaiety, as if one had been both rested and well entertained.

These are only a few scattered personal experiences, and I have no philosophy of dreams to suggest. It is in my case an inherited power. My father was the most vivid and persistent dreamer I have ever met, and his dreams had a quality of unexpectedness and interest of which I have never known the like. The dream of his, which I have told in his biography, of the finding of the grave of the horse of Titus Oates, seems to me one of the most extraordinary pieces of invention I have ever heard, because of the conversation which took place before he realised what the slab actually was.

He dreamed that he was standing in Westminster Abbey with Dean Stanley, looking at a small cracked slab of slate with letters on it. "We've found it," said Stanley. "Yes," said my father, "and how do you account for it?" "Why," said Stanley, "I suppose it is intended to commemorate the fact that the animal innocence was not affected by the villainies of the master." "Of course!" said my father, who was still quite unaware what the inscription referred to. He then saw on the slab the letters ITI CAPITANI, and knew that the stone was one that had marked the grave of Titus Oates' horse, and that the whole inscription must have been EQUUS TITI CAPITANI,- -"The horse of Titus the Captain"--the "Captain" referring to the fact that my father then recollected that Titus Oates had been a Train-band Captain.

My only really remarkable dream containing a presentiment or rather a clairvoyance of a singular kind, hardly explicable as a mere coincidence, has occurred to me since I began this paper.

On the night of December 8, 1914, I dreamed that I was walking along a country road, between hedges. To the left was a little country house, in a park. I was proposing to call there, to see, I thought, an old friend of mine, Miss Adie Browne, who has been dead for some years, though in my dream I thought of her as alive.

I came up with four people, walking along the road in the same direction as myself. There was an elderly man, a younger man, red- haired, walking very lightly, in knickerbockers, and two boys whom I took to be the sons of the younger man. I recognised the elder man as a friend, though I cannot now remember who he appeared to be. He nodded and smiled to me, and I joined the party. Just as I did so, the younger man said, "I am going to call on a lady, an elderly cousin of mine, who lives here!" He said this to his companions, not to me, and I became aware that he was speaking of Miss Adie Browne. The older man said to me, "You have not been introduced," and then, presenting the younger man, he said, "This is Lord Radstock!" We shook hands and I said, "Do you know, I am very much surprised; I understood Lord Radstock to be a much older man!"

I do not remember any more of the dream; but it had been very vivid, and when I was called, I went over it in my mind. A few minutes later, the Times of December 9 was brought to my bedroom, and opening it, I saw the sudden death of Lord Radstock announced. I had not known that he was ill, and indeed had never thought of him for years; but the strange thing is this, that he was a cousin of Miss Adie Browne's, and she used to tell me interesting stories about him. I do not suppose that since her death I have ever heard his name mentioned, and I had never met him. So that, as a matter of fact, when I dreamed my dream, the old Lord Radstock was dead, and his son, who is a man of fifty-four, was the new Lord Radstock. The man I saw in my dream was not, I should say, more than about forty-five; but I remember little of him, except that he had red hair.

I do not take in an evening paper, but I do not think there was any announcement of Lord Radstock's illness, on the previous day; in fact his death seems to have been quite sudden and unexpected. Apart from coincidence, the rational explanation might be that my mind was in some sort of telepathic communication with that of my old and dear friend Miss Adie Browne, who is indeed often in my mind, and one would also have to presuppose that her spirit was likewise aware of her cousin Lord Radstock's death. I do not advance this as the only explanation, but it seems to me a not impossible one of a mysterious affair.

My conclusion, such as it is, would be that the rational and moral faculties are in suspense in dreams, and that it is a wholly primitive part of one's essence that is at work. The creative power seems to be very strong, and to have a vigorous faculty of combining and exaggerating the materials of memory; but it deals mainly with rather childish emotions, with shapes and colours, with impressive and distinguished people, with things marvellous and sensational, with troublesome and perplexed adventures. It does not go far in search of motives; in the train-catching dreams, for instance, I never know exactly where I am going, or what is the object of my journey; in the ceremonial dreams, I seldom have any notion of what is being celebrated.

But what I cannot in the least understand is the complete withdrawal of consciousness from the inventive part of the mind, especially when the observant part is so eagerly and alertly aware of all that is happening. Moreover, I can never understand the curious way in which dream-experiences, so vivid at the time, melt away upon awakening. If one rehearses a dream in memory the moment one awakes, it becomes a very distinct affair. If one does not do this, it fades swiftly, and though one has a vague sense of rich adventures, half an hour later there seems to be no power whatever of recovering them.

Strangest of all, the inventive power in dreams seems to have a range and an intensity which does not exist when one is awake. I have not the slightest power, in waking life, of conceiving and visualising the astonishing landscapes which I see in dreams. I can recall actual scenes with great distinctness, but the glowing