De Quincey describes how in such dreams he saw ". . . a crowd of ladies, a festival and dances. And I heard it said, or I said it to myself, ' These are English ladies from the unhappy times of Charles I. These are the wives and daughters of those who met in peace, and sat at the same tables, and were allied by marriage or by blood; and yet after a certain day in August, 1642, never smiled upon each other again, nor met but in the field of battle; and at Marston Moor, at Newbury, or at Naseby, cut asunder all ties of blood by the cruel sabre, and washed away in blood the memory of ancient friendship.' The ladies danced, and looked as lovely as the court of George IV. Yet I knew, even in my dream, that they had been in the grave for nearly two centuries. This pageant would suddenly dissolve; and at a clapping of hands, would be heard the heart-quaking sound of Consul Ro-manum: and immediately came sweeping by in gorgeous paludaments, Paulus or Marius, girt round by a company of centurions, with the crimson tunic hoisted on a spear, and followed by the ololagmos of the Roman legions".

1 Maeterlinck, "The Unknown Quest".

In dreams such transitions from time present backwards to time long past, and onwards to time yet to come, are lightly made; they present no difficulties to the imagination that is not bound by the laws that govern our thoughts of time by day. The following is taken from a short note of such a transition dream, dated January, 1915:

In my dream I am looking across the grasslands and cornfields of a countryside that seems half, but only half, familiar to me. By degrees I realise that I am looking at the actual fields of Waterloo. As I gaze at them I see a thin line of men hurrying over the crest of the low, grey hill in front of me. They are coming over at a running pace, and I can see the ancient red uniforms of the British soldiers. Waterloo is being fought and I am there watching it! And a guide standing by my side, like the chorus in a Greek play, is telling me what the distant scenes of the battle mean. From very, very far away the faint sound of cheering comes across the plain; the guide tells me to listen and to hear whether the sound has "the long-drawn-out note of the British hurrah," or if it is the sharp punctuated note of the Hochs, that would signify the coming of Blucher's army.

A few seconds later the scene of the dream and its century had changed, and it was carried forward into a future which, at the moment when this note was written, seemed infinitely far off; for it now took place in the public square of a strange foreign city, where under innumerable flags, and with triumphant music, and a procession of the soldiers of all nations, the Peace which was at last to end the Great War was being celebrated.

The annihilation by the imagination of the sense of time, separating us from the past and from the future, is a mental operation very similar to that which imagination accomplishes for us when we try to reconstruct an event in history. There are pages in which great historians have lighted up historic scenes, giving them the force of living reality; but, left to ourselves, how few of us can impart life to history in this way? Memory supplies the materials for both the mental picture that we try to form and for the dream picture, but I think that the impression made upon the mind by the dream is often far more vivid than the other. No written records, however, of such dreams give any idea of the extraordinary sense of reality that they impart at the moment; and unfortunately many of us who see vividly in our dreams are unable to record our dreams at all, or are but little able to convey any adequate impression of their force by means of written words.

Amongst dreams which have been clearly suggested by a definite act of memory are the numerous dreams which have their origin in words or phrases that have been preserved by memory in the hinterland of our thoughts, and which start into prominence as soon as we are asleep.

Memory has only to bring up from these stores, and to suggest to the dream imagination, some remembered word, some place-name or some familiar phrase, and the idea thus suggested is at once seized upon, and the imagination begins its constructive work. A sentence, for instance, which is familiar to us, is often the opening from which a whole dream story will grow. The following is the briefest example that I can find in my notes of a dream that grew in this way out of a remembered phrase:

November, 1916.

I was standing in the midst of a great crowd in the open space of the Mall in front of Buckingham Palace. Like the rest of the world, I had come out to see the remnant of the army of Belgium who had survived the Great War, and who, peace having been declared, had been brought to London to receive the welcome of our King and people. The crowd about me was so dense that for a time I could only see the shoulders of the people near me, but presently it parted a little, and I could see an army of short dark men, dressed in splendid uniforms with touches of scarlet about them, whilst others were in uniforms almost covered with gold. Some one standing just behind me (as the "guide" so often stands) said, "Why, they are all chamarre d'or, like the Guards' band at a State dinner or ball in the Palace," but I was so sorely disappointed that I turned away almost in tears. "Oh, but I did not come to see this," I said;"these men look merely like dressed-up dolls!" and indeed they were not in the least like the war-worn soldiers whom I had pictured, and who had fought and suffered bo long. In the sharpness of my dis-appointment I awoke. I began as usual writing down the dreams of the night.

Something about this particular dream haunted me, something that was certainly missing from it that would explain it, and I lay awake wondering - whilst some other part of my mind was meanwhile at work, actively searching for the missing connection or idea - for a refrain which I felt somehow echoed through the dream itself, but which I could not recall. And then suddenly it flashed back to me in the words: "But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they that are clothed in soft raiment dwell in kings' houses. But what went ye out for to see?" Kings' houses - those were the familiar words round which the dream had crystallised, and the origin of it at once became clear. The crowd outside the King's palace! What had we come out to see? The dream imagination did the rest, and made up the brief dream story.