The Book of Dreams and Ghosts, Andrew Lang [free children's online books txt] 📗

is clearly one of the tales which come round in cycles, either because events repeat themselves or because people will unconsciously localise old legends in new places and assign old occurrences or fables to new persons.  Thus every one has heard how Lord Westbury called a certain man in the Herald’s office “a foolish old fellow who did not even know his own foolish old business”.  Lord Westbury may very well have said this, but long before his time the remark was attributed to the famous Lord Chesterfield.  Lord Westbury may have quoted it from Chesterfield or hit on it by accident, or the old story may have been assigned to him.  In the same way Mr. Rutherford may have had his dream or the following tale of St. Augustine’s (also cited by Scott) may have been attributed to him, with the picturesque addition about the piece of Portuguese gold.  Except for the piece of Portuguese gold St. Augustine practically tells the anecdote in his De Cura pro Mortuis Habenda, adding the acute reflection which follows. {16}

“Of a surety, when we were at Milan, we heard tell of a certain person of whom was demanded payment of a debt, with production of his deceased father’s acknowledgment, which debt, unknown to the son, the father had paid, whereupon the man began to be very sorrowful, and to marvel that his father while dying did not tell him what he owed when he also made his will.  Then in this exceeding anxiousness of his, his said father appeared to him in a dream, and made known to him where was the counter acknowledgment by which that acknowledgment was cancelled.  Which when the young man had found and showed, he not only rebutted the wrongful claim of a false debt, but also got back his father’s note of hand, which the father had not got back when the money was paid.

“Here then the soul of a man is supposed to have had care for his son, and to have come to him in his sleep, that, teaching him what he did not know, he might relieve him of a great trouble.  But about the very same time as we heard this, it chanced at Carthage that the rhetorician Eulogius, who had been my disciple in that art, being (as he himself, after our return to Africa, told us the story) in course of lecturing to his disciples on Cicero’s rhetorical books, as he looked over the portion of reading which he was to deliver on the following day, fell upon a certain passage, and not being able to understand it, was scarce able to sleep for the trouble of his mind: in which night, as he dreamed, I expounded to him that which he did not understand; nay, not I, but my likeness, while I was unconscious of the thing and far away beyond sea, it might be doing, or it might be dreaming, some other thing, and not in the least caring for his cares.  In what way these things come about I know not; but in what way soever they come, why do we not believe it comes in the same way for a person in a dream to see a dead man, as it comes that he sees a living man? both, no doubt, neither knowing nor caring who dreams of their images, or where or when.

“Like dreams, moreover, are some visions of persons awake, who have had their senses troubled, such as phrenetic persons, or those who are mad in any way, for they, too, talk to themselves just as though they were speaking to people verily present, and as well with absent men as with present, whose images they perceive whether persons living or dead.  But just as they who live are unconscious that they are seen of them and talk with them (for indeed they are not really themselves present, or themselves make speeches, but through troubled senses these persons are wrought upon by such like imaginary visions), just so they also who have departed this life, to persons thus affected appear as present while they be absent, and are themselves utterly unconscious whether any man sees them in regard of their image.” {18}

St. Augustine adds a similar story of a trance.

THE TWO CURMAS

A rustic named Curma, of Tullium, near Hippo, Augustine’s town, fell into a catalepsy.  On reviving he said: “Run to the house of Curma the smith and see what is going on”.  Curma the smith was found to have died just when the other Curma awoke.  “I knew it,” said the invalid, “for I heard it said in that place whence I have returned that not I, Curma of the Curia, but Curma the smith, was wanted.”  But Curma of the Curia saw living as well as dead people, among others Augustine, who, in his vision, baptised him at Hippo.  Curma then, in the vision, went to Paradise, where he was told to go and be baptised.  He said it had been done already, and was answered, “Go and be truly baptised, for that thou didst but see in vision”.  So Augustine christened him, and later, hearing of the trance, asked him about it, when he repeated the tale already familiar to his neighbours.  Augustine thinks it a mere dream, and apparently regards the death of Curma the smith as a casual coincidence.  Un esprit fort, le Saint Augustin!

“If the dead could come in dreams,” he says, “my pious mother would no night fail to visit me.  Far be the thought that she should, by a happier life, have been made so cruel that, when aught vexes my heart, she should not even console in a dream the son whom she loved with an only love.”

Not only things once probably known, yet forgotten, but knowledge never consciously thought out, may be revealed in a dramatic dream, apparently through the lips of the dead or the never existent.  The books of psychology are rich in examples of problems worked out, or music or poetry composed in sleep.  The following is a more recent and very striking example:—

THE ASSYRIAN PRIEST

Herr H. V. Hilprecht is Professor of Assyriology in the University of Pennsylvania.  That university had despatched an expedition to explore the ruins of Babylon, and sketches of the objects discovered had been sent home.  Among these were drawings of two small fragments of agate, inscribed with characters.  One Saturday night in March, 1893, Professor Hilprecht had wearied himself with puzzling over these two fragments, which were supposed to be broken pieces of finger-rings.  He was inclined, from the nature of the characters, to date them about 1700-1140 B.C.; and as the first character of the third line of the first fragment seemed to read KU, he guessed that it might stand for Kurigalzu, a king of that name.

About midnight the professor went, weary and perplexed, to bed.

“Then I dreamed the following remarkable dream.  A tall thin priest of the old pre-Christian Nippur, about forty years of age, and clad in a simple abba, led me to the treasure-chamber of the temple, on its south-east side.  He went with me into a small low-ceiled room without windows, in which there was a large wooden chest, while scraps of agate and lapis lazuli lay scattered on the floor.  Here he addressed me as follows:—

“‘The two fragments, which you have published separately upon pages 22 and 26, belong together’” (this amazing Assyrian priest spoke American!). {20}  “‘They are not finger-rings, and their history is as follows:—

“‘King Kurigalzu (about 1300 B.C.) once sent to the temple of Bel, among other articles of agate and lapis lazuli, an inscribed votive cylinder of agate.  Then the priests suddenly received the command to make for the statue of the god Nibib a pair of ear-rings of agate.  We were in great dismay, since there was no agate as raw material at hand.  In order to execute the command there was nothing for us to do but cut the votive cylinder in three parts, thus making three rings, each of which contained a portion of the original inscription.  The first two rings served as ear-rings for the statue of the god; the two fragments which have given you so much trouble are parts of them.  If you will put the two together, you will have confirmation of my words.  But the third ring you have not found yet, and you never will find it.’”

The professor awoke, bounded out of bed, as Mrs. Hilprecht testifies, and was heard crying from his study, “It is so, it is so!”  Mrs. Hilprecht followed her lord, “and satisfied myself in the midnight hour as to the outcome of his most interesting dream”.

The professor, however, says that he awoke, told his wife the dream, and verified it next day.  Both statements are correct.  There were two sets of drawings, one in the study (used that night) one used next day in the University Library.

The inscription ran thus, the missing fragment being restored, “by analogy from many similar inscriptions”:—

TO THE GOD NIBIB, CHILD
OF THE GOD BEL,
HIS LORD
KURIGALZU,
PONTIFEX OF THE GOD BEL
HAS PRESENTED IT.

But, in the drawings, the fragments were of different colours, so that a student working on the drawings would not guess them to be parts of one cylinder.  Professor Hilprecht, however, examined the two actual fragments in the Imperial Museum at Constantinople.  They lay in two distinct cases, but, when put together, fitted.  When cut asunder of old, in Babylon, the white vein of the stone showed on one fragment, the grey surface on the other.

Professor Romaine Newbold, who publishes this dream, explains that the professor had unconsciously reasoned out his facts, the difference of colour in the two pieces of agate disappearing in the dream.  The professor had heard from Dr. Peters of the expedition, that a room had been discovered with fragments of a wooden box and chips of agate and lapis lazuli.  The sleeping mind “combined its information,” reasoned rightly from it, and threw its own conclusions into a dramatic form, receiving the information from the lips of a priest of Nippur.

Probably we do a good deal of reasoning in sleep.  Professor Hilprecht, in 1882-83, was working at a translation of an inscription wherein came Nabû—Kudûrru—usur, rendered by Professor Delitzsch “Nebo protect my mortar-board”.  Professor Hilprecht accepted this, but woke one morning with his mind full of the thought that the words should be rendered “Nebo protect my boundary,” which “sounds a deal likelier,” and is now accepted.  I myself, when working at the MSS. of the exiled Stuarts, was puzzled by the scorched appearance of the paper on which Prince Charlie’s and the king’s letters were often written and by the peculiarities of the ink.  I woke one morning with a sudden flash of common-sense.  Sympathetic ink had been used, and the papers had been toasted or treated with acids.  This I had probably reasoned out in sleep, and, had I dreamed, my mind might have dramatised the idea.  Old Mr. Edgar, the king’s secretary, might have appeared and given me the explanation.  Maury publishes tales in which a forgotten fact was revealed to him in a dream from the lips of a dream-character (Le Sommeil et les Rêves, pp. 142-143.  The curious may also consult, on all these things, The Philosophy of Mysticism, by Karl du Prel, translated by Mr. Massey.  The Assyrian Priest is in Proceedings, S.P.R., vol. xii., p. 14).

On the same plane as the dreams which we have been examining is the waking sensation of the déjà vu.

“I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell.”

Most of us know this feeling, all the circumstances in which we find ourselves have already occurred, we have a prophecy of what will happen next “on the tip of our tongues” (like a half-remembered name), and then the impression vanishes.  Scott complains of suffering through a whole dinner-party