(Because sometimes it's irksome to read from pictures! We get you.)
"Oh! then I see Queen Mab hath been with you---
She is the Fancy's midwife"
To a mere man of the world, dreams may be considered rather troublesome matters. His speculations, if a merchant, sometimes depend upon them, but fortunately, to no very great extent. If betrayed into error by them once, it is rarely the case that he does not get wiser thereon---the warning, serving well, as all matters of experience, to keep him out of farther experiments of a similar description: and, taking the experience which he gets by them into consideration, they may be said to have been rather beneficial to him than otherwise. Not so with the man who lives upon dreams---whose life is made up to them---whom they put to sleep in the day---particularly at lunch or mealtime--- and whom they assist to waken up at night, for the purpose of building castles which afford no shelter. Such are your poor-devil poets---the scurvy tribe. To one of these, they prove an active principle of misgovernment. They are agencies, passive it may be, but controlling, directing, and exercising, all of those, on which he depends for his very existence. I know some men who live upon dreams, not as a matter of choice, but of necessity, in a double sense. I don't know but I may be one of that description myself. I certainly dream myself, sometimes, out of an appetite, and, vice versa; particularly when my chop-house bears upon its tesselated but repelling front, the talismanic and awful characters, "no credit," done in the most legible, and not to be mistaken, Roman characters---a not unfrequent event, and, for the remedy of which, my experience in the fine arts---although, of late, a professcur in the school of Jeremy Diddler---has, as yet, found nothing. Dreams, on occasions such as these, may be held rather pleasant than otherwise. They, at least, with a due sense of retributive justice, contribute somewhat to silence the appetite they have helped to provoke. With their aid, I can then calculate, to a nicety, the relative distance between a doubt and a negative---the value of a possibility, and the number of these necessary to the formation of a single probability. Hunger and thirst, have you ever remarked, beget an admirable metaphysical propensity; and dreams are not apt to lessen, to any great extent, the organ of speculation. This idea, by the way, is not original. There is a Spanish proverb, from Andalusia, which says,
"When the cook's out o' the way,
The preacher comes in play!"
or something equivalent---I cannot lay my hands on the original. It is curious, however, to observe, that a supper and no supper, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, are productive of the same effect. The omission and commission both bring night-mare. We sleep indeed, but,
"In that sleep, what dreams do come!"
Ay, what dreams do come! You have taken a surfeit, have you? and in spite of the hourly and daily exhortations of the Journal of Health against the practice, you have eaten heartily, cormorant-like, of a heavy supper, and gone immediately to bed. Perhaps you have not taken this trouble. We will couple your supposed case with one of our own, which, unfortunately for our comfort at the time, was any thing but supposed. You have passed the night, in imagination at least. The sun looks red and bloody as he rises. A cursed weight appears resting on the hinder part of your skull, while a Parthian soldiery employs itself in hurling heated darts over and throughout the regions of the temples and the brain. These are your actual bodily undergoings. The dreams---those evils which are mental---are worst of all. If you are an imaginative man---I do not mean a scribbler of verse---nothing is more common,
than to feel yourself held, by your thinnest and most gossamery hair, over the brink and threshold of some infernal precipice, so deep and capacious, that you may be occupied in falling, a thousand or two years, before you can, by any possibility, arrive at the bottom. Some giant---some Passamonte or Morgante, who,
"Plucks up pines, beeches, poplar-trees and oaks,
holds and maintains you, by the aforesaid hair; while, with a degree of indulgence, for which you express but little gratitude, your eyes, to your infinite satisfaction, are permitted to go before your person and explore the horrible recesses and depths of the deep beneath you. There you behold, in most incongruous confusion, adders with green heads and forked tongues; basilisks, vipers, all sorts of slimy reptiles and monsters, and of wild beasts, an infinite variety; meant to afford you, possibly, a free choice in the manner of your death. You feel yourself tottering and trembling. Though in other respects, and at any other time, a lean man, you have now learned to dread your own weight and substance; and are led to entertain a wish, that you had not, during the days of the past year, been so heartily a consumer of the various excellent marketabilities of your good landlady's good table. At this time, you perceive that the gruff and insolent monster, who, with the fiendish grin of an ogre, holds you in this predicament, is exulting over your approaching fate, and playing, like a cat, with your mouse-like terrors, before you are made to feel the final pang, and consummate the dreadful catastrophe. When you are sufficiently familiar with the anticipation of the thing, you behold him leisurely taking a huge carving-knife from his breeches pocket; always, providing he be no sans culotte ---no highlander. You watch him with an eye, that calculates to a miracle, the time he occupies in the application of the wire-edge to that gossamery thing of hair, which your heart, all the time, wishes were a chain cable of ten-pound links. He cuts---you feel yourself going, going, gone. You experience a terrible and an uncomfortable shock. There are strange, uncouth, and fearful ringings in your ears---a hideous noise and clamor around, and about, and within you---a weight, as of ten thousand ton of rock upon your breast, and a corkscrew of heated iron, seething and crunching in your head. Your first thought is, that after sending you down so hastily, your vindictive and merciless tyrant has hurled the entire mass of rock down after and upon you; a conjecture which tends not very extravagantly towards increasing your comfort or quiet. You attempt to scream in your agony, but the effort dissipates in a weak and husky murmur, the sound of which dies in your throat, incapable of forcing its way through the aperture of your mouth. In vain would you move or stir---your limbs fall relaxed from the effort, as if under the spell of an enchanter. But while you are yet undetermined as to the precise occasion of your present discontent or discomposure, the sounds that stunned your ears, and shattered and distracted your nerves and understanding, suddenly ceased; the mountain rolls from your chest, and, although the pain does not exactly depart from your head, you feel, to a certain degree, relieved in that quarter.
But, where are you? That is the question. You look around, and the first thing you perceive---(always supposing your dreams have arisen from repletion, and a hearty supper) and the first natural object your eyes may be expected to rest upon, is your own proper person, of course. You are on the floor stretched off at length, rather quietly and composedly than otherwise, all circumstances considered. The next thing you perceive, for your eyes fail to take in all these things at once, is the large family dining-table at your side, some of the legs of which are civilly resting upon your own. By an ugly abrasion of your right nostril, from which the blood still continues freely to flow, and which you readily recognise and claim as your own, you perceive that the shin bone of the ham that rests passively before you, has, upon no very remote occasion, been cruelly familiar. A large plate, from which you remember to have eaten an hour or two agone, has quartered itself in epigrammatic angles upon the retouched lines of your face---a decanter and sundry glasses, a further survey has made out to number among the slain; some utterly and irretrievably demolished---ground to powder. Over all of these, as your senses begin to comprehend the various details, ad libitum, you behold the lean and withered form of your weather-beaten landlady, who is blind and deaf, entering the room with a dim lantern in one hand, and a broom stick in the other, adding to your enjoyments by a well sustained application of the latter domesticality to your back, head, sides, front, and so forth, accompanying the physical development with a rapid and running commentary of "sis cat," "sis cat," "sis cat," in a family tone, to which, from repeatedly having heard, not one of the whole feline tribe for a mile round, but would have treated with due and unequivocal respect. In vain do you cry out, "Mrs. Jones, it is I; Mr. --- (whatever the name may be) and not the cat. Permit me to assure you, Mrs. Jones, it is not the cat. I am your lodger, my dear madam--- you are beating your lodger and not the cat." The good old lady has a most religious respect for her organs of sight and sense of hearing, however deficient, in reality, they may be; and continues to belabour away most unmercifully, until, by a violent and extraordinary effort, you at once shake off nightmare, table, and landlady, and bruised, battered, and broom-sticked, you retreat to the quiet of your chamber, inwardly blaming your stars and cursing yourself that you were not there a full hour before. Such, in some sort at least, is the usual fortune of him who suffers from repletion. But, then comes the opposite extreme. The absence of enough, even worse than the presence of too much, begets its own degree of miserable acuteness. "A hungry man," says Butler, "is very like unto a famished wolf." He is right; the creature is a beast and a wild one. Incapable, half the time, of determining how long the domestic territory may remain unoccupied; an intelligent and cruelly speculative imagination comes in to co-operate with the vulture, the gnawings of which render you gaunt and spiritless, yet furious and savage. But there is quite too much reality, too much nature in the matter, to need or receive, for the purposes of comment, much aggravation from one's dreams. It is too certain and too homely a truth. It will not require to be computed by the rule of three. It is a horrible state of vacuity, and we'll have no more of it.
Nothing, after all, is so dreadful in dreaming, as the breaking off from sudden fright, or awakening in the very middle of your mystery. Devil take the fractions, and a fig for the figment, say I, with the Spanish barber of Seville. In the very midst of good fortune, to open your unfortunate eyes to lose that, which, with eyes shut, your active senses have been able to discern and compass. This is an enlightenment with a vengeance! The sun becomes any thing but metaphorically dark; and your only remedy and hope for the renewal of your luck, lies in your being able again to lose your sight---that is to say, to fall asleep as speedily as may be possible. We can well imagine---imagine, did we say? egad, we know, to our sorrow, the excessive labour of an effort to re-dream ourselves into fortune. Have we not beheld the buried and hidden treasures of the pre-adamites; and with the assistance of Aladdin's lamp, looked over into those glowing heaps of glittering and resplendent gems, the possession of which, could they be appreciated without, might almost compensate the most curious for every visual darkness? Frequently has it been our lot, after toiling through the day, and at midnight, sinking to our couch and chamber exhausted and prostrate, to enjoy towards morning some blessed dream of fairy land---while thousands of the tiny creatures, all in green, were busily employed in amassing its golden treasures, incomputable piles of which were at once within our grasp; wealth without limit or compass lay before us, luring us into that seductive but momentary feeling of happiness, which departed with the glittering but delusive fancy that produced it. How sweet not to have slept---not to have awakened. How many dreams of another kind are there from which it had been a pleasure, almost beyond the faculty of the choicest vision to afford, never to have awakened.
But a truce to our dreams. Queen Mab has been with us, and is with us no longer. All the fairy tribe, from the goblin of indigestion, the Gobbleton Mowbray of imagination, down to the shadowy pigmy of famine and non-consumption, have departed, and it boots us not to speculate upon the absent. Our daydreams---a species similarly troublesome, have their agencies likewise; but of them we say nothing. They have a more earthly, dollar and cent, and far less spiritual likeness. They are evokable in the shapes of bread, beef, beer, and other condiments. Of these we shall speak hereafter. We shall meet at Philippi! When Jim Taylor was carried to jail by the deputy, on some cruel suspicions which went greatly to affect his credit, he barely and briefly soliloquised, "I guessed how it would be, from what I seed last night." Jim had been troubled with dreams, and the insolvent debtor's act gave him an opportunity of rendering to his creditors a schedule of them. By this he had more than enough for the payment of all his debts. He had dreamed, like other specious gentlemen, but when his tailor refused to credit, Jim's dreams proved unavailable. A voyage of discovery, fitted out under his assignment, failed to discover the land of Nod, in which his property lay. In terra firma he was equally unfortunate, and like his part biographer, he became a notorious chronicler of the unsubstantials; wrote for the lady public, as we do; but, unlike ourself, and here all comparison ends, through the liberality of reader and publisher, was soon put beyond all farther necessity to dream.
