Page images
PDF
EPUB

awaking M. Dieulafoy was handed a dispatch saying that his brother had died during the night.

On another occasion M. Dieula foy dreamed that he was giving a large ball at his country house, when suddenly stretchers bearing corpses were carried through the assemblage in the ball-room. The next morning, while he was relating his dream to Mme. Dieulafoy, his manager informed him that the farmer and his wife who lived on the country estate had been drowned in a canal. They had been taken to the house and the bodies borne through the ball-room precisely as M. Dieulafoy had seen in his dream.

Mme. de Blavatsky, the exponent of theosophy, has taught that many laws governing psychic conditions are unknown to science; among them the laws governing the phenomena of dreams, a doctrine that is corroborated by modern scientists of even the most materialistic school. According to theosophical doctrines, dreams are the experiences of the wandering soul, temporarily freed from the trammels of the body. Cases of persons having witnessed occurrences that actually transpired at vast distances from where the bodies lay asleep have been authenticated in support of this theory.

Not only do physical stimuli affect the dream, but psychic or psychological influences have been known to do so, a fact that has been contended by occultists and theosophists for many years before the reluctant admission was wrested from science.

The occultists, however, are somewhat at variance upon the subject of dream sources. Papus and others of his school agree with Porphyry and Synesius in attributing dreams to spiritistic sources, namely, to elementals or evil spirits in some instances, and to spiritual and holy influences in many cases. On the other hand, Franz Hartmann, also an occultist, distrusts dream experiences as a commingling of the objective and the subjective that necessarily engenders confusion of the psychic and physical. Although he admits that the deeper

dreams are purely psychic, he does not consider that man is at present sufficiently developed spiritually to receive them.

Besides the authorities cited in this chapter there are countless popular writers upon the subject of dreams and their interpretation. In many instances their work is based upon symbols as old as the history of the human race itself. Hence the socalled "Dreambooks" possess a value of their own, apart from the satisfaction which they undoubtedly afford their readers, now even as they have done for centuries.

The art of Geomancy, recommended by Raphael, a popular oneiromantic authority, is extensively practiced by the Chinese. In figuring the dreams after this system the results prove mysteriously correct.

Thus have dream students of all ages, races and conditions puzzled over and expounded upon the infinitely reiterated phenomena of dreams, and whether we decide to view the subject from the scientific pinnacle of the century whose spirituality is yclept psychology, and whose soul is called the subconsciousness, or whether we descend to the humble depths of primitive faith, whose god was elemental fire, we are equally far from a solution of the mystery. It therefore behooves us to approach the subject with an open mind and to examine each authority without prejudice, and with due respect for that practical, hard-headed and at times most kindly of teachers— Experience.

CHAPTER III

SLEEP, THE MYSTERY

"We are obliged to regard every phenomenon as a manifestation of some power by which we are acted upon.”—SPENCER, First Principles.

The law of physical traits, transmitted from generation to generation, is too firmly established to admit of question, and atavism is a positive factor in the study of the human brain. Upon the same principle the psychology of ancestral or inherited memory should take a prominent position in both waking and dreaming consciousness. As yet the quantity and the quality of these bequeathed experiences are unclassified, for while they are generally granted as existent we can not be positive as to whether they are filmy, vanishing visions or impressions, too fragile to be worthy of record, or whether they are psychological entities to be prefigured even before their appearance in the realm of consciousness. The frequency with which dream experiences bear a grotesque resemblance to ancestral conditions permits us, in lieu of a more practicable theory, to regard them as representing the racial development of our forbears. Not only has the theory of inherited memory a certain therapeutic value but it is of distinct historical importance. In this instance the dreams of children and of uneducated persons deserve more consideration than those of the intellectually developed, who might naturally be supposed to be influenced by tradition, reason and acquired knowledge.

Professor Stanley Hall finds inherited memory, or atavism, most strongly indicated in the dreams universally classified as typical.

"Our animal ancestors were not birds and we cannot inherit sensations of flying, but they floated and swam for longer than they have had legs; they had a radically different mode of breathing and why may not there be vestigial traces of this in the soul as there of gill-slits under our necks? . . . To me sensations of hovering, gliding by an inner impulse rather than limbs, falling and rising have been from boyhood, very real, both sleeping and waking.”—Study of Fear, Stanley Hall.

The same eminent authority also advocates the theory of atavism as an explanation of morbid fears. The fear dreams that are traceable to nothing within our actual or knowable experience are assumed to have been begotten by experiences of another age. They are unknown to the visual knowledge of the dreamer, and frequently it is impossible to articulate them into definite ideas, but they hover, shapeless, shadowy horrors in the subconsciousness; this especially applies to the terrors and dreams of childhood.

Authorities disagree as to the source of the creative faculty that frequently manifests in dreams, but the theory of inherited memory is the most generally accepted, even when, as in many instances, it implies the memory of past civilizations, which alone could have furnished the knowledge of conditions described in the dream.

The widely quoted experience of Professor Agassiz, in which he solved in his dream a problem that had baffled him for weeks, is a puzzle which has many answers. The obscure outline of a fossil fish on a marble slab meant nothing to the great naturalist who vainly endeavored to decide what portions of the marble should be chiseled away in order to bring the whole fish to light. At length the completed fish appeared in his dream; for three successive nights the vision returned, until finally he sat up in his darkened bedroom, made a sketch of the fish he had seen in his dream and, turning over, went back to sleep. The next morning he discovered that his dream-self had drawn the fish with sufficient accuracy to

determine him to break the surface of the stone beneath which the fossil was concealed. This knowledge of piscatorial anatomy could scarcely have been inherited from ignorant forbears, nor could it have lain in the learned man's subconsciousness, for the fossil remains antedated any fish within his experience; and in view of the uncharted experiences in race history which the immensity of the nervous system makes possible, such a dream may naturally be attributed to inherited memory.

The objection put forth by many scientists to this doctrine is that it opens the door not only to reincarnation or metempsychosis, but to clairvoyance, spiritualism and other superterrestrial modes of acquiring super-terrestrial knowledgeor theories. As yet the information acquired by these methods is challenged and held as scientific heresy, although Jung, Freud and many others at times draw perilously near the borderline. To quote Jung: "From all these signs it must be concluded that the soul has in some degree historical strata, the oldest stratum of which would correspond to the unconscious."

Inherited memories as translated by science, do not move in generations, they bound in centuries, and this idea is something akin to the teaching of reincarnation, or the rebirth of the same soul through countless lives and vast experiences whose memory is closed by the gates of birth and death. Between these portals the mortal may now and again catch startling glimpses of the terrors and joys of past lives. Most frequently these experiences come by way of dreams.

The acceptance or denial of these theories is a question, not of the theory, but of the student's temperament. There are in the present age two cardinal types of temperament, the scientific and the mystical. The latter accepts religious creeds without doubt or question; to these the light of the miracles shines in the sky to-day even as it did two thousand years ago. The former type, the scientific, questions religious faith, but takes for granted any statement upon which sci

« PreviousContinue »