At Day's Close

by A. Roger Ekirch

  Still, one should not be misled by Georgian ingenuity. For every active intellect following first sleep, there were others initially neither asleep nor awake. The French called this ambiguous interval of semi-consciousness dorveille, which the English termed “twixt sleepe and wake.” Unless preceded by an unsettling dream, the moments immediately following first sleep were often characterized by two features: confused thoughts that wandered “at will” coupled with pronounced feelings of contentment.37 “My heart is free and light,” wrote William Cowper. In his evocative description of awakening from “midnight slumber” in “The Haunted Mind,” Nathaniel Hawthorne insisted, “If you could choose an hour of wakefulness out of the whole night, it would be this. . . . You have found an intermediate space, where the business of life does not intrude; where the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly the present.” Less sanguine about “our solitary hours” when “waking in the night or early in the morning” was the Hammersmith minister John Wade, who complained in 1692 of men’s “unsettled independent thoughts,” “vain unprofitable musing,” and “devising mischief upon their beds.”38

  III

  The prisoner, loaded with the fetters of despotism, sits far from his dungeon, and accuses his tyrant before assembled worlds. The odious inequality amongst men has, in a manner, ceased.

  LOUIS-SÉBASTIEN MERCIER, 178839

  Often, persons emerged from their first sleep to ponder a kaleidoscope of partially crystallized images, slightly blurred but otherwise vivid tableaus born of their dreams—what Tertullian rightly labeled the “business of sleep.” So in an early English story, the Emperor Dolfinus receives during “his first slepe” a prophetic vision, and Canacee in “The Squire’s Tale,” after she “slept her first sleep,” awakens in the warm glow of a dream—“for on her heart so great a gladness broke.” Of a March night in 1676, the mystic Jane Lead recorded, “In my first sleep, in the night time, many magical workings and ideas were presented to me.” Less happily, Oliver Heywood—“at my first sleep”—had a “terrible dream” in which his son “was fallen to the study of magick or the black art.” And in Ram Alley (1611), Sir Oliver speaks of the hours before cock-crow “when maids awak’d from their first sleep, / Deceiv’d with dreams begin to weep.”40

  As in previous eras, dreams played a profound role in early modern life, every bit as revealing, according to popular sentiment, of prospects ahead as of times past. Of their disparate origins, the Stuart poet Francis Hubert wrote:

  Dreames are the daughters of the silent night,

  Begot on divers mothers, most, most vaine;

  Some bred by dayes-discourse, or dayes-delight,

  Some from the stomacke fuming to the braine.

  Some from complexion; sanguine constitutions

  Will dreame of maskes, playes, revels, melody:

  Some of dead bones, and gastly apparitions,

  Which are the true effects of melancholly.

  And some are merely forg’d to private ends,

  And (without doubt) some are propheticke to,

  Which gracious God out of his goodnesse sends,

  To warne us what to shun, or what to doe.41

  Well before the literate classes in the late eighteenth century ridiculed dream interpretation among “the vulgar,” critics like Sir Thomas Browne condemned the “fictions and falshoods” born at night. For Thomas Nashe, a dream was nothing else but a “bubbling scum or froth of the fancy.”42 Even skeptics, however, acknowledged a widespread fascination with visions. The author Thomas Tryon wrote in 1689 that an “abundance of ignorant people (foolish women, and men as weak) have in all times, and do frequently at this day make many ridiculous & superstitious observations from their dreams.” The Weekly Register in 1732 observed, “There is a certain set of people in the world, who place the greatest faith imaginable in their dreams.”43 Critics, too, sometimes proved ambivalent in their denunciations. Browne, for one, conceded that dreams could enable persons to “more sensibly understand” themselves; and the Massachusetts patriarch John Winthrop, while professing that dreams merited “no credit nor regard,” reverently recorded in his journal a colonist’s vision of divine intervention.44

  That “the English nation has ever been famous for dreaming,” as “Somnifer” observed in 1767, was reflected in the surging sales of dream-books (chapbooks, sections of fortune books, or compendiums) devoted to interpreting different varieties of visions, often with remarkable specificity. Selling in the mid-eighteenth century for prices of only one to six pence, dream-books had long been widely accessible as alternatives to local cunning-men. Several thick collections existed, including the only surviving ancient guide to nocturnal visions, The Interpretation of Dreams, written in the second century by Artemidorus of Ephesus. During the sixteenth century, it attracted such an eager following that translations appeared in Italian, French, German, Latin, and English. By 1740, the English text alone had spawned twenty-four editions. Homegrown competitors, published in London, included Thomas Hill’s The Most Pleasuante Arte of the Interpretacion of Dreames . . . , with early editions in 1571 and 1576, and Nocturnal Revels: or, a Universal Dream-Book . . . , first published in 1706. With topics from “acquaintance” to “writing” arranged alphabetically, Nocturnal Revels previewed several hundred dreams, weighing each for its hidden portent, including, for example, that “to dream you see white hens upon a dunghill, signifies disgrace by some false accusation.”45

  The general public valued not only the oracular quality of dreams but also the deeper understanding they permitted of one’s body and soul. Some visions, in the view of physicians, lay rooted in physical health, as Aristotle and Hippocrates once claimed. Asserted the sixteenth-century French surgeon Ambroise Paré, “Those who abound with phlegm, dream of floods, snows, showers, and inundations, and falling from high places.” More fortunate were “those whose bodies abound in blood,” who “dream of marriages, dances, embracings of women, feasts, jests, laughter, or orchards and gardens.”46 Other dreams, according to common belief, threw a shaft of light on the inner core of a person’s character. Well before the Romantic philosophers of the nineteenth century and, later, Sigmund Freud, Europeans prized dreams for their personal insights, including what they revealed of one’s relationship with God. “The wise man,” the essayist Owen Feltham wrote in 1628, “learnes to know himselfe as well by the nights blacke mantle, as the searching beames of day.” Between the two, night was the superior instructor, for “in sleepe, wee have the naked and naturall thoughts of our soules.” For Tryon, who denied their prophetic qualities, dreams “not only shew the present state of each man’s soul . . . but also what our dispositions, complexions, and inclinations are waking.”47

  Some revelations were unwelcome. The Puritan cleric Ralph Josselin reported in his diary: “They say dreames declare a mans temperament, this night I dreamd I was wondrous passion with a man that wrongd mee and my child insomuch as I was shamed of my selfe, god in mercy keepe mee from that evill.” The Anglican Archbishop William Laud was much troubled by a dream in which he “reconciled to the Church of Rome,” as was Samuel Sewall after dreaming that “stairs going to heaven” led nowhere.48

  Oppressive rituals and rules that made daily life more arduous less often applied in the boundless freedom of dreams. Hence the proverb “The dogge dreameth of bread, of rauging in the fields, & of hunting.” According to the Marquis de Caraccioli in 1762, the soul is finally able to “see, talk, and listen. . . . We gain a new world when we sleep.” Those persons forced to adopt a foreign language by day could dream at night in their native tongues; others in their visions freely swore oaths or enjoyed erotic fantasies. Leering husbands, spouses suspected, committed adultery without once leaving their sides. Such visions Pepys cherished all the more dearly during the height of London’s Great Plague. After dreaming of a liaison with Lady Castlemaine (“the best that ever was dreamed”—
“all the dalliance I desired with her”), Pepys reflected: “What a happy thing it would be, if when we are in our graves . . . we could dream, and dream but such dreams as this.” “Then,” he added, “we should not need to be so fearful of death as we are this plague-time.” So suspicious of his visions was Pepys’s wife that she took to feeling his penis while he slept for signs of an erection. By contrast, John Cannon had “a wonderful dream,” full of “different turns & postures,” only to discover, at the end, that his paramour was his own spouse.49

  Jacob Jordaens, The Dream, or The Apparition by Night, seventeenth century.

  One can only guess how many visions escaped mention by diarists. Most dreams likely appeared too routine to record. Laud set down in his journals but thirty-two dreams from 1623 to 1643, whereas Josselin described a total of thirty-three during the entire period from 1644 to 1683.50 In his autobiography, Cardano explained, “I have no desire to dwell upon the insignificant features of dreams,” choosing instead to relate “those important aspects of dreams which seem to be the most vivid and determining.” Unfortunately, what Cardano dismissed as unimportant—“What would be the use?” he wondered—may have been more revealing than less pedestrian visions. In addition, he informed his readers that he did “not wish to relate” numerous “amazing dreams” that were “strange beyond belief.” Thus, he excluded dreams either too commonplace or too sensational. An eighteenth-century Virginia planter, in his own diary, declined to “set down” an “ugly dream” lest, he feared, “these pages fall into bad hands.” Little wonder that even Freud, the most famous modern advocate of dream interpretation, expressed pessimism over being able to penetrate the visions of historical figures.51

  Still, general impressions are possible, based upon a range of visions recorded by individuals. Most dreams, it seems clear, were fairly ordinary, mirroring day-to-day concerns. A visitor to North Wales dreamed of “eternally climbing over rocks,” while a scholar dreamed of books both lost and found.52 Despite one historian’s assertion that dreams before the nineteenth century dealt largely with symbols of heaven and hell, diverse images crowded visions—profane as well as sacred. Even in clerics’ dreams, spiritual themes did not predominate. Samuel Sewall dreamed in 1686 that Christ personally visited Boston, lodging overnight at “Father Hull’s.” Yet, as Thomas Jolly acknowledged, “Sometimes my dreams are holy and things hang together therein, but my dreams are ordinarily vain, God knows.”53

  Numerous dreams were unpleasant. Many of those recorded in diaries reflected feelings of anxiety, sadness, or anger. “There are more bad dreams than good,” rued Margaret Cavendish.54 While the frequency of negative emotions is not unusual, compared to analyses of twentieth-century visions, more revealing are the specific sources of unease among diarists. Some dreamers had special fears, such as falling prey to financial distress, lawsuits, political chicanery, or even military attack. Sewall, for example, twice dreamed of French invasions of Boston.55 More elementary concerns, however, dominated. Physical ills loomed large, especially, it seems, the fear of rotting teeth (a persistent source of anxiety even today). In one vision, Laud lost nearly all of his teeth after contracting scurvy.56 Other agonies ranged from catching fire (not just in hell but asleep in bed) to being mauled by mad dogs (rabid animals were no small concern). Elizabeth Drinker dreamed of her son choking on a rind of roast pork.57 A common fear was violence by another’s hand. Poisoning frightened many, as did grislier deaths. Elias Ashmole dreamed that his father, in escaping from prison, besides suffering a blow to his head, had “his right thigh cut off near the groin.” And Boswell, during a visit to Edinburgh, envisioned a “poor wretch lying naked on a dunghill in London, and a blackguard ruffian taking his skin off with a knife in the way an ox is flayed.”58 Evil spirits abounded, both in visions of hell and familiar settings. The Methodist Benjamin Lakin recorded a dream of having been forced one night to elude demons when returning home from a religious service.59

  Death was inescapable. Among others, Josselin, Sewall, Parson Woodforde, and William Byrd II all dreamed of their deaths. John Dee’s vision in 1582 foretold his disembowelment as well as death, and the Cambridge Alderman Samuel Newton in 1708 dreamed of digging his own grave. Josselin and Sewall both dreamed of the loss of their wives and children, and Boswell of the passing of his daughter and his father (on three separate occasions), with whom his relations were often strained.60 Other visions contained miscarriages and deaths by plague. Newton dreamed in 1695 of a “great many persons” carrying corpses. An entry in Laud’s diary recalled, “I dreamed of the burial of I know not whom, and I stood by the grave. I awakened sad.”61

  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.”62

  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.”63

  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.64

  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.”65 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.66

  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.67