WHAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF. 287 



be tempted to deny the material origin of the vision Dr. Reid had a 

 blister applied to his head, and dreamt accordingly that he had been 

 scalped by Indians. Here the connection between the dream and the 

 outward impression, manipulated so to speak by the brain, was clear. 

 But that connection may be anything but patent in cases where a 

 person dreams of being frozen to death, the exciting cause having 

 been merely a deficiency of bedclothes on a chilly night. In a case 

 related by Dr. Carpenter, where an eminent judge dreamt of being 

 tormented by a crowd of lizards which were crawling over him, the 

 origin of the dream was still more difficult to trace. The cause of 

 his reptilian visitation was readily explicable, however, on his entering 

 the apartment in which he had spent the previous evening, when he 

 saw on the base of a clock a number of carved lizards. A similar 

 instance is afforded by a personal experience of the writer, in which 

 he dreamt that he was walking in a forest in which lizards of every hue 

 and kind were engaged in a combat with humming-birds. Puzzling 

 himself over the origin of this dream, it at last dawned upon his recol- 

 lection that some time previously he had travelled in a railway-car- 

 riage having for his vis-a-vis a lady whose hat was decorated with 

 humming-birds' plumage, fastened by a brooch accurately repre- 

 senting a lizard. By the same kind of association revived by memory, 

 and often projecting forgotten reminiscences into the mental fore- 

 ground, dreams are suggested which deal with events at first sight apt 

 to be mistaken for those of utterly spontaneous nature. Maury relates 

 that in early life he visited a village on the Marne named Trilport. 

 His father had built a bridge at this spot. The subject of one 

 dream was that his childhood days were again being spent at Tril- 

 port, and that a man in uniform,^ on being asked his name, told 

 Maury that he was the bridge gate-keeper and mentioned his name, 

 which Maury distinctly remembered when he woke. Of this name 

 he had no recollection whatever, but on inquiring of an old servant of 

 his father's if a person of the name in question was once gate-keeper 

 at Trilport bridge, she replied in the affirmative, and mentioned that 

 the man kept the gate when the bridge was built. 



Thus does memory play strange tricks with our imagination, 

 especially when the latter faculty runs riot in the absence of will and 

 consciousness, and relates itself to the world of dreams. The super- 

 natural theory of dreams and warnings recently revived in our midst 

 is, after all, but a sop to the Cerberus of ignorance. It is easy far 

 too easy for the peace and comfort of many minds to convert a 

 mere coincidence between a dream and an event into a close relation- 

 ship which sees in the dream a foreshadowing of the event in question. 

 But in science, as in healthy common-sense, there is no justification 

 for the continuance of such superstition. If certain dreams are 

 warnings and portents, what shall we say of those to which no such 



