Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/282

272[February 20, 1869] . The chairs were buxom fat chairs, anything but spectral, stuffed all over with flock, and covered with a merry-patterned chintz, that went down to their feet like petticoats, making them look like jolly old chair-women (if the pun will pass) taking their ease. The room was still fragrant of the scent of wild flowers, that had come in, on the autumn breeze, from the fields and woods.

Being tired and sleepy, I soon put out my candle, and, having drawn up the blind in order that my eyes, even from bed, might rest on the deep calm expanse of moonlit sky, I dived down into the yielding feathery depths of the great fourposter.

The moon was shining brightly into the room, lighting up the white bed-furniture. Through the window, I could see two fir-trees standing out, sharp and black, against the pure glowing night sky. Watching them, I saw a little giddy star rising behind, now glittering in sight like a gem, now lost from view behind a sombre bough. It seemed to be playing a game of hide and seek with me, behind the tree branches, and to twinkle merrily, when it came out from a black bit of tree into the sky again. I can't tell how long I watched that saucy little star: but it was time enough to be able to calculate pretty exactly, how long it would take to rise up through the next branch that would obscure it. At last I lost my gay little friend behind a dark mass of foliage, and, seeing that it had now got into a deep bit of tree that would take it a good half hour to get through, I reckoned I would go to sleep.

(My object, I may as well confess, in parenthesis, in this little paper, is to endeavour to analyse the growth of a dream, out of the simply natural into the grotesque. What I am about to record, of last night, is one of the very few I have been able to so analyse, the waking impressions of dreams being generally so vague and incoherent; but I shall give it in every particular, as it fixed itself on my mind when I woke.)

I knew I was going to sleep. I knew, moreover, presently that I was asleep; but the moment in which wakefulness merged into slumber, I have never, on this or any other occasion, been able to detect. Although distinctly conscious that I was dreaming, I still saw my room, and my window, and the fir-trees, and was still watching for the star to come out through the bit of tree. I pretended, however, to myself that I did not know I was dreaming, and chuckled to think of the deception I was practising on myself, who thought I was. I had thus resolved myself into two distinct personalities. One personality firmly believing what I saw to be real and material, and the other personality deriding the idea. But I myself, the deriding personality, was in my turn taken in. Looking towards the bottom of my bed, which I so well knew was only phantasy, I saw a dreadful dwarf, of whose unreality I could by no means persuade myself. I certainly did not then know, nor can I recal at what point of my dream I first discovered, that my other and more credulous self was at that moment having its laugh at me, well knowing that the dreadful dwarf which alarmed me was only a distorted mind-picture of a little comical figure of a man made out of a lobster-shell, of which I had caught sight whilst undressing. I had seen him hanging, by a loop of tape, to a bright nail over the mantelpiece, when I got into bed.

There, however, stood the dreadful dwarf at my bed's foot, vivid and plain. The first thing that made him seem terrible, and at the same time made me believe in him, was the vague impression on my mind that I had somewhere seen him before, but could not for the life of me tell where. If I had before seen him alive, I knew he must be real, without a doubt. But how could I have seen him before, except in life, or in a previous state of existence? I was convinced he was a real live being, and the moment I became so convinced, the horrible thing demonstrated the fact by rolling its eyes, and making a chop with its jaws. He was a dreadful dwarf. His nose and chin were like, and of the colour of, lobster pincers; his hair was like the little bristly hair on lobsters' feet; he had two great antennæ, which he swished about, and eyes at the end of protruding muscles, which revolved, so that he could see round a corner. He was a dwarf, understand, to me, as compared with my natural size, but, in comparison with the little image of which my other self knew he was but the picture, he was a giant of fearful proportions. I suppose it was these two views of his relative size, as seen by my two distinct selves, made me so confused as to his apparent size, as to lead me to think this terrible being at one moment expanded into a giant, and the next, contracted into a dwarf again. Such, at least, was my impression; and he became very hideous from these sudden contractions and expansions, like a grotesque india-rubber nightmare. There was one little detail about the figure especially annoying to me, for the simple reason that I could not explain it, yet it seemed to convince me in some odd way that he was very real, and no dream fancy. It was a loop sticking up at the back of his coat. Now, I argued with myself, this is no creation of fancy, because no man would ever dream a coat on a hobgoblin, with a real loop to hang up that coat by, when it was done with. It seemed so life-like. My other self knew very well that loop had no such purpose, that it had a deeper and probably a deadlier meaning, but could not recollect what. So the loop passed into a mystery to my other self, and a subject of awe to me. A mystery and a subject of awe. Then I noticed a subtle vapour that was stealing about the dreadful dwarf, wrapping him round in wreaths. As he still kept on madly elongating himself from dwarf to giant, and shrinking again from giant to dwarf, I noticed the vapour entirely hid him from sight when he shrivelled up to his smallest, so that I could no longer see him as a dwarf, but it only reached to his knees as a giant. This was a source of terror, as I always feared he would emerge