The Argosy — page 84: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

74 “THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF.” ROM time immemorial, dreams have been the wonderland of waking hours. Hope and Fear have wrought them into their own fabric. Superstition has seized upon them and worked up a curious ritual of “dreams that go by contraries,” of “ dreams of the morning light,” of dreams with significances, some of which seem natural enough, whilst to a few of those apparently most arbitrary, Science herself has offered a certain amount of explanation. Dreaming is an experience which may be called common to humanity, though it varies so widely in different individuals that, in a few exceptional cases, it is absolutely unknown. Pliny and Plutarch both refer to such instances. Specialists on nervous disease report having known patients who declared they had never dreamed but once. The writer of this paper has heard a young gentleman of great vivacity and lively fancy declare that he had dreamed so seldom that he had a vivid recollection of every dream he ever had! Scientific writers assert that “‘a dream must have a foundation, and this is either impressions made upon the mind at some previous period or produced during sleep by bodily sensations.” As an illus- tration, it is said that ‘‘ before the discovery of America, no Euro- peans ever dreamed of American Indians”—an assertion which seems to be too sweeping for scientific proof, and by which nothing can be proved but that such Europeans when awake could not have described such dreams by the name of a race they had never heard of | Certainly dreams are often made of materials very inadequate to their finished result. Abercrombie relates that during an alarm ofa French invasion, in Edinburgh, it had been arranged that the first intimation of the enemy’s approach was to be the firing of a gun from the castle. A certain gentleman, a zealous volunteer, retired to bed, dreamed that he heard this gun, went out, and witnessed and joined in the proceeding of the troops. At this juncture, he was awakened by his wife in a great fright, she having had a similar dream. It was ascertained that the falling of a pair of tongs in an upper chamber was the common origin of the dream in two minds already predisposed to the same line of fancy. Another instance is given of a person sleeping in a room where a flat-iron was allowed to scorch a woollen garment. The sleeper dreamed that the house was burned down, and that she could not escape because all her clothes were destroyed ! A gentleman, who, before retiring to sleep, had been reading a book of picturesque travels, dreamed that he was journeying across conniclooolkks CO