At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (48 page)

Among more pleasant dreams, visits with dead or distant loved ones were prevalent, no small comfort in times of high mortality. The author of Mid-
Night Thoughts
wrote of “frequent conversations with dead friends when we sleep.” A Venetian rabbi, Leon Modena, recorded one such reunion with a revered teacher and another with his mother. “Very soon, you will be with me,” she informed him. Lady Wentworth, on the other hand, dreamed of her distant son. “Thees three nights,” she wrote him in 1710, “I have been much happyer then in the days, for I have dreamt I have been with you.” In parts of the Alps, large numbers believed in the existence of the
Nachtschar
, “night phantoms” that returned from the dead in the dreams of shamans. Just a few holy men, such as the Bavarian herdsman Chonrad Stoeckhlin of Oberstdorf, were thought to possess the mysterious ability, when asleep, to join the phantoms’ feasts. At these, according to Stoeckhlin and other shamans, there was dancing and joyous music. In the Americas, some slaves, in their visions, flew home to West Africa. Of a trip under the aegis of a “good spirit,” a New England slave recounted, “At length we arrived at the African coast and came in sight of the Niger. . . . The shades of night seemed to break away, and all at once he gave me a fair view of Deauyah, my native town.”
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If, as playwrights and poets romanticized, sleep soothed the weary and oppressed, their principal relief likely came from dreams. Although at times unpleasant, the mere act of dreaming was testament to the independence of souls. As a French writer reflected in 1665, sleep’s ability to refresh the “body and mind” was less important than “the liberty” it gave to “the soul.” While sleep itself often proved unsatisfying, visions represented not only a road to self-awareness but a well-traveled route of escape from daily suffering. The allure of dreams may have grown after the Middle Ages when for many years the Catholic Church held fast to a doctrine that only monarchs and ecclesiastics likely experienced meaningful visions. A character in one of Jean de La Fontaine’s fables averred, “Fate’s woven me no life of golden thread, / Nor are there sumptuous hangings by my bed: / My nights are worth no less, their dreams as deep: / Felicities still glorify my sleep.”
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Jean-Honoré Fragonard,
The Beggar’s Dream
, ca. 1769. An aging pauper dreams of a happier time as a young man with a family.

No doubt for some indigent people, as the satirist William King remarked, “Night repeats the labours of the day.” But other persons derived solace from their visions. “The bed generally produces dreams, and so gives that happiness,” wrote an eighteenth-century newspaper correspondent, “which nothing else cou’d procure.” If the sick dreamed of health, so did unrequited lovers of wedded bliss and the poor of sudden wealth. In Norfolk, a popular folktale told how a peddler from the village of Swaffham thrice dreamt that “joyfull newse” awaited him on London Bridge. After the long journey, he stood patiently on the bridge until a shopkeeper, happening by, asked “if he was such a fool to take a jorney on such a silly errand.” What’s more—the story went—the shopkeeper related his own dream from the preceding night in which he discovered a vast treasure buried behind a peddler’s house in Swaffham. What, the shopkeeper wondered, could be more foolish? Thanking him for his words, the peddler returned home only, of course, to unearth the treasure from his own backyard.
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Less frequently, dreams afforded humble men and women opportunities for combating evil and avenging past wrongs. The theologian Synesius of Cyrene, as early as the fifth century, lauded the inability of tyrants to censor their subjects’ visions. Dreams, as George Steiner has remarked, “can be the last refuge of freedom and the hearth of resistance.” During the early modern era, this occurred most famously among peasants in the Italian region of Friuli who belonged to a fertility cult. Known as
benandanti
, they battled witches in their dreams in order to protect crops and livestock. Explained the cult member Battista Moduco, “I go invisibly in spirit and the body remains behind; we go forth in the service of Christ, and the witches of the devil, we fight with each other, we with bundles of fennel and they with sorghum stalks.”
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An English ballad, “The Poet’s Dream,” complained that laws “burthen’d the poor till they made them groan.” “When I awakened from my dream,” describes the ballad, “methoughts the world turn’d upside down.” During the English Civil War, the Digger leader William Everard cited a divine vision in support of his own radicalism. A dream, in fact, led the Diggers to select St. George’s Hill in Surrey for their egalitarian commune.
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A few aggrieved souls even acted out violent visions in their sleep—a propensity confirmed in modern psychiatric research. A Spanish treatise in the mid-fifteenth century spoke of murderous sleepwalkers—“as is well-known, has happened in England.” In France, a schoolboy’s quarrel with a companion so poisoned his dreams that he rose when at rest to stab his sleeping nemesis with a dagger. A Scottish apprentice, Mansie Wauch, nearly pummeled his wife one night, dreaming that she was, in fact, his master attempting to drag him from a playhouse. “Even in my sleep,” Wauch later reflected, “it appears that I like free-will”—demonstrably more in his dreams than in his waking hours.
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The impact of dreams in preindustrial communities never became as enduring as it has long been in many non-Western societies. Not only do dreams in some African cultures still provide a critical source of guidance, but they also constitute alternate realms of reality with distinctive social structures. Among the Alorese in the East Indies, entire households are awakened once or several times each night by family members anxious to communicate fresh visions.
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All the same, early modern communities attached great weight to dreams. Numerous people practiced the “art of procuring pleasant dreams,” whether by reading before bed, avoiding heavy meals, or by placing a piece of cake beneath one’s pillow. No friend to superstition, Franklin devoted an entire essay to the subject of sanguine dreams, advising, among other measures, moderate meals and fresh air. Country maidens reportedly resorted to charms in order to glimpse their future husbands. One sixteenth-century spell, reprinted in an English chapbook, required the girl to place an onion beneath her pillow before reciting a short verse. Whereupon, “lying on thy back, with thy arms abroad, go to sleep as soon as you can, and in your first sleep you shall dream of him.”
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Such was their currency that the contents of visions often bore repeating within households, between neighbors, and in letters and diaries. In the late summer of 1745, Ebenezer Parkman recorded, “A story has got about of a dream of Mrs. Billings, and which I took the freedom to enquire into and which she confirmed.” “There are still many,” voiced a critc in 1776, “who are frequently tormenting themselves and their neighbours with their ridiculous dreams.” Nearly thirty years later, a man’s dream of an impending earthquake in Germantown, Pennsylvania, sent several residents in whom he confided scampering for safety.
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From this distance, the influence that dreams had upon individuals and their personal relationships is difficult to imagine. Reverberations could last from fleeting minutes to, in rare instances, entire lifetimes. In the wake of dreams, diarists wrote of feeling “stured up,” “perplex’d,” and “much afflicted.” Margaret Baxter’s dreams of murders and fires, according to her husband Richard, “workt half as dangerously on her as realities.” “There are many whose waking thoughts are wholly employed on their sleeping ones,” observed a contributor to the
Spectator
in 1712. Friendships might be severed, romances kindled, and spirits either lifted or depressed. A dream prompted the decision of the Virginia colonist John Rolfe to marry the Indian maiden Pocahontas. In 1738 George II was so disturbed by a vision of his deceased wife that, in the dead of night, he went by coach to Westminster Abbey to visit her coffin.
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Some persons, by drawing religious inspiration from dreams, found their lives enriched. Although Hannah Heaton in Connecticut labeled visions a “foundation of sand,” she, like many others, believed that they could “do good when they drive or lead the soul to god & his word.” Similarly, a Lancashire doctor opined that it was “below a Christian to be too superstitious and inquisitive” about dreams, yet he also believed in “extraordinary dreams in extraordinary cases.”
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Henry Fuseli,
Midnight
, 1765. Two men conversing in their beds (perhaps after their first sleep), with one plainly startled, likely from a dream or nightmare.

So influential were visions, so vast was the “prerogative of sleep” that frontiers grew blurred between the waking and invisible worlds. Events in visions occasionally appeared genuine days afterward. An Aberdeen minister, after viewing an unusual spectacle outside his window, later could not remember “whither he dreamed it or seemed to see it in reality.” Claimed a correspondent to the
Sussex Weekly Advertiser
, “How many dreams do we daily hear related, and with such consequence and plausibility, that the relater himself believes he was awake.” At the Old Bailey in 1783, Richard Deavill defended his theft of four iron bars by claiming the owner’s consent. That it came in a dream appears, to Deavill, to have been an afterthought, or so he claimed. More remarkable is that a credulous jury found him not guilty of the crime.
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Had preindustrial families not stirred until dawn, remaining instead asleep, many visions of self-revelation, solace, and spirituality would have perished by the bedside—some lost in the throes of sleep, others dissipated by the distractions of a new day—“flitting with returning light,” wrote the poet John Whaley. “Like a morning dream,” affirmed John Dryden’s Oedipus (1679), “vanish’d in the business of the day.”
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Instead, the habit of awakening in the middle of the night, after one’s first sleep, allowed many to absorb fresh visions before returning to unconsciousness. Unless distracted by noise, sickness, or some other discomfort, their mood was probably relaxed and their concentration complete. In fact, the force of some visions—their impact intensified by elevated levels of the hormone prolactin—might have kept nighttime vexations at bay. After the moment of awakening, there also would have been ample time for a dream to “acquire its structure” from the initial “chaos of disjointed images.” It is probably not coincidental that Boswell, whose sleep was rarely broken, just as rarely “had a recollection” of dreams when he woke each morning. In contrast, the earnest author of
The New Art of Thriving
(1706), felt compelled to warn readers against pondering their visions:

What a ’shame is it to spend half ones lifetime in dreams and slumbers; leave your bed therefore when first sleep hath left you, lest custom render your body sluggish, or (which is worse)
your mind a cage of unclean thoughts
[my italics].
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Nearly two hundred years ago, a European psychologist, Sigismund Ehrenreich Graf von Redern, deduced that persons “rudely awakened” from their “first sleep” had the “same feeling” as if they had been “interrupted at a very serious task.” Clinical experiments at the National Institute of Mental Health confirm that subjects who experienced two stages of slumber were in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep just before they awakened around midnight, with REM being the stage of sleep directly connected to dreaming. What’s more, Thomas Wehr has found, “transitions to wakefulness are most likely to occur from REM periods that are especially intense,” typically accompanied by “particularly vivid dreams” distinguished by their “narrative quality,” which many of the subjects in his experiment contemplated in the darkness.
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So in the drama
Gallathea
, before an audience that included Queen Elizabeth on New Year’s night in 1592, the character Eurota remarked, “My sleeps broken and full of dreams.” Affirmed Nicholas Breton, around one o’clock the “spirits of the studious start out of their dreames.” Hannah Heaton awoke in the night from a dream bearing news of an angel from God. “Good part of the night,” she jotted in her diary, “I watcht for fear I should forget this lovely dream.” And in Lancashire, Richard Kay reflected, “I have dreamed dreams that when I have awoke out of them they have, even in the dark and silent night, brought me upon my knees and deeply humbled me.”