Escape, and Other Essays - Arthur Christopher Benson (free novel reading sites .txt) 📗

to tell me were sucking up water, but which I believed to be the eye of God. The trees were bare, but the elm-buds were red, and the willow-rods were crimson with spring; the little stream bubbled clearly off the hill; and the cottage gardens were full of up-thrusting blades; while the mezereons were all aflame with bloom. Life moving, pausing, rushing past! I wonder. When I pass the gate, if I see the dawn of that other morning, I cannot help feeling that I shall want to see my little village again, to loiter down the lane among the white-gabled houses. Shall I be much wiser then than I am now? Shall I have seen or heard something which will set my anxious mind at rest? Who can tell me? And yet the old, gnarled apple-boughs, with the blue sky behind them, and the new-springing grass all seem to hold the secret, which I want as much to interpret and make my own as when I wandered through the hamlet under the wold more than thirty years ago.


IX


DREAMS

There is a movement nowadays among the philosophers who study the laws of thought, to lay a strong emphasis upon the phenomena of dreams; what part of us is it that enacts with such strange zest and vividness, and yet with so mysterious a disregard of ordinary motives and conventions, the pageant of dreams? Like many other things which befall us in daily life, dreams are so familiar a fact, that we often forget to wonder at the marvellousness of it all. The two points about dreams which seem to me entirely inexplicable are: firstly, that they are so much occupied with visual impressions, and secondly, that though they are all self- invented and self-produced, they yet contrive to strike upon the mind with a marvellous freshness of emotion and surprise. Let us take these two points a little more in detail.

When one awakes from a vivid dream one generally has the impression of a scene of some kind, which has been mainly received through the medium of the eye. I suppose that this varies with different people, but my own dreams are rather sharply divided into certain classes. I am oftenest a silent spectator of landscapes of ineffable beauty, such as a great river, as blue as sapphire, rolling majestically down between vast sandstone cliffs, or among wooded hills, piled thick with trees rich in blossom; or I see stately buildings crowded together among woodlands, with long carved fronts of stone and airy towers. These dreams are peculiarly uplifting and stimulating, and I wake from them with an extraordinary sense of beauty and wonder; or else I see from some window or balcony a great ceremony of some quite unintelligible kind proceeding, a procession with richly dressed persons walking or riding, or a religious pomp taking place in a dim pillared interior. All such dreams pass by in absolute silence. I have no idea where I am, nor what is happening, nor am I curious to know. No voice is upraised, and there is no one at hand to converse with.

Then again there are dreams of which the substance is animated and vivid conversation. I have long and confidential talks with people like the Pope or the Tsar of Russia. They ask my advice, they quote my books, and I am surprised to find them so familiar and accessible. Or I am in a strange house with an unknown party of guests, and person after person comes up to tell me all kinds of interesting facts and details. Or else, as often happens to me, I meet people long since dead; I dream constantly, for instance, about my father. I see him by chance at a railway station, we congratulate ourselves upon the happy accident of meeting; he takes my arm, he talks smilingly and indulgently; and the only way in which the knowledge that he is dead affects the dream is that I feel bewildered at having seen so little of him of late, and even ask him where he has been for so long that we have not met oftener.

Very occasionally I hear music in a dream. I well remember hearing four musicians with little instruments like silver flutes play a quartet of infinite sweetness; but most of my adventures take place either among fine landscapes or in familiar conversation.

At one time, as a child, I had an often repeated dream. We were then living in an old house at Lincoln, called the Chancery. It was a large rambling place, with some interesting medieval features, such as a stone winding staircase, a wooden Tudor screen, built into a wall, and formerly belonging to the chapel of the house, There were, moreover, certain quite unaccountable spaces, where the external measurements of passages did not correspond with the measurement of rooms within. This fact excited our childish imagination, and probably was the origin of the dream.

It always began in the same way. I would appear to be descending a staircase which led up into a lobby, and would find that a certain step rattled as I trod upon it. Upon examination the step proved to be hinged, and on opening it, the head of a staircase appeared, leading downwards. Though, as I say, the dream was often repeated, it was always with the same shock of surprise that I made the discovery. I used to squeeze in through the opening, close the step behind me, and go down the stairs; the place was dimly lighted with some artificial light, the source of which I could never discover. At the bottom a large vaulted room was visible, of great extent, fitted with iron-barred stalls as in a stable. These stalls were tenanted by animals; there were dogs, tigers, and lions. They were all very tame, and delighted to see me. I used to go into the stalls one by one, feed and play with the animals, and enjoy myself very much. There was never any custodian to be seen, and it never occurred to me to wonder how the animals had got there, nor to whom they belonged. After spending a long time with my menagerie, I used to return; and the only thing that seemed of importance to me was that I should not be seen leaving the place. I used to raise the step cautiously and listen, so as to be sure that there was no one about; generally in the dream some one came down the stairs over my head; and I then waited, crouched below, with a sense of delightful adventure, until the person had passed by, when I cautiously extricated myself. This dream became quite familiar to me, so that I used to hope in my mind, on going to bed, that I might be about to see the animals. but I was often disappointed, and dreamed of other things. This dream visited me at irregular intervals for I should say about two or three years, and then I had it no more; but the singular fact about it was that it always came with the same sense of wonder and delight, and while actually dreaming it, I never realised that I had seen it before.

The only other tendency to a recurring dream that I have ever noticed was in the course of the long illness of which I have written elsewhere; my dreams were invariably pleasant and agreeable at that time; but I constantly had the experience in the course of them of seeing something of a profound blackness. Sometimes it was a man in a cloak, sometimes an open door with an intensely black space within, sometimes a bird, like a raven or a crow; oftenest of all it took the shape of a small black cubical box, which lay on a table, without any apparent lid or means of opening it. This I used to take up in my hands, and find very heavy; but the predominance of some intensely black object, which I have never experienced before or since, was too marked to be a mere coincidence; and I have little doubt that it was some obscure symptom of my condition, and had some definite physical cause. Indeed, at the same time, I was occasionally aware of the presence of something black in waking hours, not a thing definitely seen, but existing dimly in a visual cell. After I recovered, this left me, and I have never seen it since.

These are the more coherent kind of dreams; but there is another kind of a vaguely anxious character, which consist of endless attempts to catch trains, or to fulfil social engagements, and are full of hurry and dismay. Or one dreams that one has been condemned to death for some unknown offence, and the time draws near; some little while ago I spent the night under these circumstances interviewing different members of the Government in a vain attempt to discover the reasons for my condemnation; they could none of them give me a specific account of the affair, and could only politely deplore that it was necessary to make an example. "Depend upon it," said Mr. Lloyd-George to me, "SUBSTANTIAL justice will be done!" "But that is no consolation to me," I said. "No," he replied kindly, "it would hardly amount to that!"

But out of all this there emerges the fact that after a vivid dream, one's memory is full of pictures of things seen quite as distinctly, indeed often more distinctly, than in real life. I have a clearer recollection of certain dream-landscapes than I have of many scenes actually beheld with the eye; and this sets me wondering how the effect is brought about, and how the memory is enabled to store what appears to be a visual impression, by some reflex action of the nerves of sight.

Then there is the second point, that of the lively emotions stirred by dreams. It would really appear that there must be two distinct personalities at work, without any connection between them, one unconsciously inventing and the other consciously observing. I dreamed not long ago that I was walking beside the lake at Riseholme, the former palace of the bishops of Lincoln, where I often went as a child. I saw that the level of the lake had sunk, and that there was a great bank of shingle between the water and the shore, on which I proceeded to pace. I was attracted by something sticking out of the bank, and on going up to it, I saw that it was the base of a curious metal cup. I pulled it out and saw that I had found a great golden chalice, much dimmed with age and weather. Then I saw that farther in the bank there were a number of cups, patens, candlesticks, flagons, of great antiquity and beauty. I then recollected that I had heard as a child (this was wholly imaginary, of course) that there had once been a great robbery of cathedral plate at Lincoln, and that one of the bishops had been vaguely suspected of being concerned in it; and I saw at once that I had stumbled on the hoard, stowed there no doubt by guilty episcopal hands--I even recollected the name of the bishop concerned.

Now as a matter of fact one part of my mind must have been ahead inventing this story, while the other part of the mind was apprehending it with astonishment and excitement. Yet the observant part of the mind was utterly unaware of the fact that I was myself originating it all. And the only natural inference would seem to be that there is a real duality of mind at work.

For when one is composing a story, in ordinary waking moments, one