Chapter 8

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS

THE past is all of one texture - whether feigned or suffered -
whether acted out in three dimensions, or only witnessed in that
small theatre of the brain which we keep brightly lighted all night
long, after the jets are down, and darkness and sleep reign
undisturbed in the remainder of the body. There is no distinction
on the face of our experiences; one is vivid indeed, and one dull,
and one pleasant, and another agonising to remember; but which of
them is what we call true, and which a dream, there is not one hair
to prove. The past stands on a precarious footing; another straw
split in the field of metaphysic, and behold us robbed of it.
There is scarce a family that can count four generations but lays a
claim to some dormant title or some castle and estate: a claim not
prosecutable in any court of law, but flattering to the fancy and a
great alleviation of idle hours. A man's claim to his own past is
yet less valid. A paper might turn up (in proper story-book
fashion) in the secret drawer of an old ebony secretary, and
restore your family to its ancient honours, and reinstate mine in a
certain West Indian islet (not far from St. Kitt's, as beloved
tradition hummed in my young ears) which was once ours, and is now
unjustly some one else's, and for that matter (in the state of the
sugar trade) is not worth anything to anybody. I do not say that
these revolutions are likely; only no man can deny that they are
possible; and the past, on the other baud, is, lost for ever: our
old days and deeds, our old selves, too, and the very world in
which these scenes were acted, all brought down to the same faint
residuum as a last night's dream, to some incontinuous images, and
an echo in the chambers of the brain. Not an hour, not a mood, not
a glance of the eye, can we revoke; it is all gone, past conjuring.
And yet conceive us robbed of it, conceive that little thread of
memory that we trail behind us broken at the pocket's edge; and in
what naked nullity should we be left! for we only guide ourselves,
and only know ourselves, by these air-painted pictures of the past.

Upon these grounds, there are some among us who claim to have lived
longer and more richly than their neighbours; when they lay asleep
they claim they were still active; and among the treasures of
memory that all men review for their amusement, these count in no
second place the harvests of their dreams. There is one of this
kind whom I have in my eye, and whose case is perhaps unusual
enough to be described. He was from a child an ardent and
uncomfortable dreamer. When he had a touch of fever at night, and
the room swelled and shrank, and his clothes, hanging on a nail,
now loomed up instant to the bigness of