Part 17

Two dreams of this species I should like to offer for consideration. I have had not less than twenty others, widely different in substance though all alike in principle; but the memory of most of them is vague if not entirely obliterated. Of the first dream here related I may say that I am repeating it from a fresh memory and am following the notes I made of it in full immediately upon awakening from it. The account here given is therefore as accurate as I can make it. I may further explain that the setting of the dream is a very natural one for me. I happen to be a college professor, and lecturing to classes is my daily round. Also I have lived in France, and have studied and written about the educational system of that country; and I number among my friends a distinguished French professor now visiting America. The bearing of these facts upon the dream will be clear in a moment.

I dreamt that I was lecturing to one of my regular classes in college. In the class, upon my entrance, I was surprised to find my friend the French professor, of whom I spoke a moment ago. With him there was an impressive individual whom I somehow recognized as a French inspector of schools--one of those officials whose visits to provincial schools and whose consequent reports to the minister at Paris are the chief hope and dread of the French pedagogue. How these gentlemen should have come to be visiting my class, I could not imagine, but I do not think I was much worried in the dream over that question. I do remember telling myself that as a mere American professor I had nothing to fear from the inspector's formidable authority, though perhaps with this reflection there went also a resolution to put my best foot forward in such distinguished company. But I had not much time to ponder these matters before proceeding upon my lecture.

It was then that a real surprise began. So far as I could tell, my opening sentences were sufficiently conventional, but the way the class was affected by them was singular to a degree. Hardly had I reached the middle of the first one before all the students had their eyes fixed on me in a way that might possibly have been complimentary had not their expressions been so various and so peculiar. A few students wore a look of great relief--for all the world as if they had expected to find me dumb on that day, and were agreeably surprised to be disillusioned. A considerably larger number frowned displeasure, just as if I had disturbed them in the pursuit of something that was no affair of mine. But the large majority showed mere astonishment, and of that emotion, indeed, a good measure was written on the faces of all. I had no notion what to make of these unusual appearances. Inevitably my first thought was to glance furtively down at my clothes and shoes to see if everything was well in those departments. Also I raised my hand as unobtrusively as possible to discover whether perchance I had left my hair uncombed. In the absence of the mirror's final test I had to conclude that all was about as it should be.

Naturally my next sentences hardly came trippingly from the tongue, nor did any alteration occur in my listeners to facilitate my labors. On the contrary, what had at first been mainly mere surprise upon their faces was growing rapidly to obvious merriment with about half of the class, and to evident disapprobation with the others. "The explanation of what we call the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century," I remember hurling at them with a fine generality of dream-eloquence, "is to be sought not so much in the influence of the doctrines of Descartes proper, or of those who could call themselves consistent Cartesians, as in the general dependence upon the guidance of human ratiocination, of which dependence he was only an illustrious example." This remarkable statement did not seem to offend any of my hearers, but neither did it mollify them. By a considerable effort, however, I was regaining a measure of composure, as I proceeded into my subject, in spite of all the frowners and all the titterers in the class. There was nothing to do, I felt, but to brave both parties, and in some degree, as the minutes dragged on, I seemed to be succeeding in the effort. At least there was less staring at me, and one after another the faces of my students were turned down to the desks, and pens began to course across pages in what appeared to me to be good note-taking fashion.

But I was soon to find that my troubles had only begun. The class had indeed ceased to perform like one man in astonishment, but various individuals now began to act in fashions unaccountably extraordinary. Not only did resentment at my lecture keep lingering, and growing, on many countenances, and not only did laughter keep bubbling up in others, but now certain more specific eccentricities began exhibiting themselves. A mild instance was the action of one of my most devoted note-takers, a woman who sat on the front row. She had always taken too many notes, as I had observed; she never missed anything important, and she frequently copied down much that was far from important. And now I noticed that in the middle of certain cardinal statements I was making, and even making slowly in order that every one who wanted them in a note-book might have time to get them fully, she took her pen from the paper, and meditatively putting the end of it in her mouth, proceeded to gaze out of the window into vacancy as if trying to think what on earth to write next.

But this, as I say, was mild. That particular student was too well-bred to be ruder. So was another girl on the front row who, a little later, laid aside her pen and paper and sank her head for several minutes into her hands in such a way as to make me wonder whether she was suffering from headache or whether she was politely veiling an outbreak of laughter such as certain other members of the class were at no such pains to conceal. Certainly when her face emerged it was clear that she had not even been smiling. She looked at me fixedly for a minute, with such an inquiring though guarded glance as one might give a stranger whom one half suspected of mild lunacy, and then resumed work with her pen. There were numerous examples of similarly harmless but abnormal conduct, and I had no choice but to endure them in wondering patience. But when one sedate and trusted student, also a woman, who sat in the rear of the class, deliberately caught my eye and then impressively laid her finger tightly over her closed lips, thus giving me the unmistakable signal for silence, my astonishment and bewilderment grew amain. What on earth could be wrong with me, I asked myself, that I should be bedevilling my students in this fashion? What absurdity was at the bottom of all this? Had everybody in my class gone crazy? Or had I?

Somehow I went on lecturing. As I remember it now, the lecture seemed orthodox enough, in spite of the strange events that it inspired. I felt that I was acquitting myself moderately well, though I remember that I mopped my brow repeatedly, and longed for the end of the period as I had never longed for time to pass before. What would my visitors think of me, or of this precious class of mine? I alone had seen that mute sign for silence, to be sure, but no one could fail to notice the other preposterous things that were coming to pass. For now three men toward the rear of the class began, seemingly by agreement between them, to shake their heads at me in a solemn and unequivocal signal that I would do better to leave off my lecture. This, I thought, would be the worst; but no, in a moment one man actually stepped up to my desk, and when I paused, whispered a very apologetic request that I would not trouble the class further by lecturing on this particular day. He had listened with great interest to my former lectures, he was pleased to say, but he felt that he was speaking for the whole class in intimating that to-day I could not but disturb them, and in fact endanger them, if I continued. I told him that he could save himself from further danger by quitting the room; and this he did forthwith, his reluctance exceeded only by his apparent amazement.

The others seemed to understand what had passed between us, though I was sure that they could not have overheard a word we said. Four or five of them, indeed, rose and followed their departing brother from their room, with faces as full of bewilderment as his. But I was past wondering at anything by this time. Endeavoring to seem indifferent to their departure, I ploughed on, with a pertinacity far beyond anything I possess in a waking state, through the middle of my lecture. I had come to Rousseau and his battle with the apostles of the Enlightenment. And about this point the craziest of all the occurrences of this remarkable hour began. A man on the front row picked up a card-board box from the floor near his feet. Opening it, he produced a roll of absorbent cotton. With bits of this he deliberately set about stopping up his ears as tightly as he could. When he had stuffed them full he resumed work with his pen, but passed the cotton, with a wink, on to his neighbor, who repeated the performance. A third student filled his organs of audition and handed the box on to a fourth. I watched that blessed roll of cotton make its round of the students. One and all of them, men and women, stuffed their ears with it!

How I managed to keep on talking is rather more than I can tell. I can only say that I continued automatically, and paid the slightest possible attention to the antics with which my auditors were pleased to amuse themselves. I was but little surprised when, after a while, they began to leave. Not concertedly, but one by one, they rose and passed out, still lowering, giggling, trembling, looking askance at me, or exhibiting some other inexplicable emotion as they departed. Each one, with whatever mien, took pains to leave a record in the form of a few sheets of paper deposited on my desk as he passed out, but I was too callous or too distraught by this time to do more than barely notice the circumstance. As for my visitors from France, they had long since disappeared--not by walking out, like the students, but simply by vanishing, as people in a dream occasionally do. I kept lecturing, doggedly, until I had only three students left. But when two of these arose together and took their departure, I knew nothing to do but cease. The one auditor remaining, for that matter, was even now about to rise from his seat. I paused. I waited as he came slowly forward, with wonder and distress written on his features--he was easily the best scholar in the class. As I eyed him I could see that he, like so many of the rest, seemed to be half afraid that I had lost my mind. We shall see about that, I thought, as I addressed him.

"Will you kindly tell me, sir," I asked him, with some warmth, "Will you kindly tell me what I have done to deserve such conduct as I have seen this last hour? Have all my students gone mad, or have I?"

Evidently I had, he thought, as was obvious in his face. But he was too cautious to say so. Instead, he manifestly did his best to placate what to him was arrant lunacy.

"Well, professor," he faltered, "I've no doubt we've been behaving rather badly. But, you see, we--well, we simply couldn't make out why you should want to lecture all through the examination hour!"

So that, of all things, was the explanation! I had simply lectured straight through their examination, and small wonder they took it strangely. How I had managed to make such a fool of myself, I did not know; but at once all their queer actions of the last hour were explained to me. And what a joke on me! How like the absent-minded, umbrella-carrying professor of the caricaturists--I protest I am not that kind--to have forgotten that I had set the examination for that day, had even sent a secretary into the class five minutes ahead of me to distribute the question-papers, and to have gone in then and insisted on haranguing the class, in spite of all protest, through the whole session!

And thus laughing at my exploit, I awoke. Needless to say, my amusement continued into the waking state, though it was somewhat less whole-hearted. But it was soon cut short by my jumping out of bed to put down the notes of the dream that I have here expanded.

I fear it is not a very interesting dream in itself, but that I did not promise. Surely it is one that answers the description given at the outset, and illustrates the species somewhat elaborately. Can any one imagine a person when awake making up such a story, planning so many details of it so carefully, without an inkling in his mind of the explanation that was to come to clear up all the mystery in the end? I do not believe so. But if not, how can one do in a dream a thing so impossible in a wakeful state? I, the dreamer, involve myself in a story in which I fabricate a series of occurrences incomprehensible to me unless I have the key that explains them, a series that nobody could well string together unless he had that key. One would say that I must have had the key in my possession as I pieced together the occurrences. Well, then, how could I be totally perplexed at those occurrences as they were happening, and how could I be astounded and provoked to laughter when I produced my own explanation of them? This is surely too much like believing that a magician will be amazed at his own trick.

Let me recount one other dream of this variety, a shorter one but possibly even more pointed. As it occurred to me some months ago, and as it comprises only an after-dinner speech, I cannot now pretend to report the words of it with literal accuracy. But that is not necessary if the reader will take my assurance that though I do not give the precise words of the speech as I heard it in the dream, I offer a version similar enough to be quite as satisfactory for the present purpose, and differing in no point of principle from the original. The very vacuity of the present version will be sufficient evidence, I hope, of my endeavor to be as faithful as possible to the original. I even feel that I must request the reader not to be disdainful of the puns that embellish the oration, since it is something other than the art of rhetoric that is here in question.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said the speaker, a man who by the way is celebrated as a post-prandial artist, but who need not be blamed in person for this coruscation, "we have with us this evening a man who bears an honorable and formidable name, a name which, in at least one person who possessed it, is enrolled on the tablets of immortality. It is a bellicose name, and therefore timely enough. But it need make no one tremble, since its most illustrious possessor loved to make the world shake with laughter as well as wince before the levelled spear of his sarcasm. I will not say that our guest of the evening has all the talents of what a tipsy man might call his great 'name-shake;' but I will answer for it that he can himself give a good imitation of what our school-boys sometimes call the 'music of the spears.' However, I will 'no be speiring,' as the Scotch say, into their further similarities; I prefer simply to present to you, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Shakespeare."

And then all the audience laughed, and I laughed with them. I laughed because I was taken by surprise when the name came and explained all the puns that had preceded it. Not by the slightest suspicion had I anticipated the name; on the contrary, I had been genuinely puzzled by the queer locutions introductory to it, for I did not even realize that they were puns upon a name that was to be pronounced later. No doubt the puns are vapid enough (though vastly amusing in a dream) but they are also fairly elaborate, and in the dream I think they were considerably more so than in the transcript here set down from memory. The question is, how can one dream a thing of this kind? For I, the dreamer, made up all those puns, since I, of course, concocted the speech I dreamed. And either I knew the name that I was punning on, or else I did not know it. If I knew it, how could I be astonished into laughter when it came to light in the dream? And if I did not know it, how could I invent a lot of puns on it? What process of cerebration was I guilty of?

I know no answer to this question, and therefore I submit it to the public. In the literature of dreams that I have perused I have found neither a solution of the present problem nor any instance of the kind of dream here mentioned. Informally I have consulted two or three psychologists of my acquaintance, but though they have been interested in the question, they have been unable to suggest an explanation. Only one other person that I know experiences such dreams as these, and he is as much interested in them as I am; but although he is himself a bit of a psychologist, he has no answer to the question here propounded. Can any one do better?

* * * * *

As has been said before in these pages, considerable attention to the topics covered by "Psychical Research" has given us a very strong suspicion that the autonomy of each mind is telepathically shared by other minds, and farther that this is due to a degree of identity of all mind somewhat similar to the identity of all force and all matter--this identity of force and matter being now well recognized, despite the individual manifestations of all three in our personalities.

Between minds a degree of identity--or at least of telepathic connection or intermingling, is abundantly manifested by the appearance of several personalities, or seeming personalities, through the sensitive persons generally called mediums, and this whether the personalities additional to the medium's ordinary one are incarnate or apparently postcarnate.

From these indications follows very directly the guess that such dreams as our contributor recounts are not really of his construction, but are constructed outside of him, and not necessarily by excarnate agencies, or even by deliberate agencies. How or where or by whom must be left for future knowledge to indicate.

We have had dreams of the nature of those described by our contributor, and have correlated them with others entirely beyond construction by our own capacities.--EDITOR.

CORRESPONDENCE

_More Freedom from Hereditary Bias_

8 State Circle, Annapolis, Md., 9 February, 1918.

GENTLEMEN:

I have your printed circular of 25 January, with an enclosed bill for a subscription to the UNPOPULAR REVIEW through 1918. I have, perhaps unfortunately, not received the January issue of the review, which you say you sent me. This is no doubt due to my removal from Princeton, New Jersey, and to the lethargic Princeton post-office.

I had several reasons for not renewing my subscription. One was a need for economy, and the feeling that I could better do without the UNPOPULAR than without such a periodical as the _New Republic_. Of the two, the UNPOPULAR mirrors much the more closely some of my own convictions and principles; but I find the _New Republic_ indispensable if I am to keep in touch with the aims and purposes of present-day American Liberalism.

Another reason I had for not renewing was that the UNPOPULAR, starting its career with the very greatest promise, had, to my humble mind, managed very quickly to run up various side-tracks and blind alleys of opinion, and has since--amiably but with complacency--stuck there. And there I am content to leave it, for in losing reality it has lost life.

The lightness of touch which its editor has creditably sought to impart to its contents will not do as a substitute for life. And even that attempt has failed; it has resulted too often in mere pertness or a lumbering buffoonery never agreeable to contemplate, and least of all when invoked in aid of a cause that demands above all earnest conviction and anything but a stupid complacency from its adherents.

Yours faithfully, (signed) ROBERT SHAFER.

It may be interesting to compare with this a letter from another correspondent with a German name, printed in Number 17.

EN CASSEROLE

_If We Are Late_

There is every prospect that this number will be out unusually late, on account of the choke-up in transportation. At this writing the printer ought to be at work on the paper, which has already been on the way to him--from Philadelphia to Massachusetts--twenty-six days.

We hope our readers will not blame the delay to us, and that their patriotism will cheerfully endure it.

_The Kindly and Modest German_

Here are some commonplaces that should be iterated in some shape every time an American organ of opinion goes to press.

There once was such a man as the kindly and modest German, and through his virtues he had nearly obtained the industrial and commercial leadership of the world, when sudden wealth and power aroused in him the brute instincts that are latent in the best of us, and started him after more than can be had from industry, and can be had only by force. The brute instincts were nearer the surface in him than in those who have a recorded civilization of some seven or eight thousand years: for the poor Germans, at least the ruling branch of them, have barely as many hundred. Even Russia was Christianized four centuries before Prussia.

Now it is a rare parvenu who is not conceited. Germany has camouflaged the old idea of conquest by that of spreading her Kultur to the inferior portion of mankind--to the peoples that produced Homer, Dante, Shakespear, Newton, Darwin and Spencer--as if those peoples were savages whose territory could be brought under civilization only by conquest, and as if Germany alone had civilization. And this absurd idea she backs up by a crude conception of the Law of Evolution--a conception that stops with the competition of brute forces. Coöperation, mutual help, emulation in well doing do not enter into her idea of evolution. She has thrown away her splendid success in the higher competition, and reverted to the competition of brute force,--camouflaged again by science and cunning.

When a conceited parvenu goes mad, his conceit is as mad as the rest of him. When he is at the same time bellicose and bloodthirsty, he will not stop fighting as long as the conceit is in his system, and the only way to get it out is to whip it out.