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 INTRODUCTORY
TOPOLOGY
Exercises and Solutions
 INTRODUCTORY
TOPOLOGY
Exercises and Solutions

Mohammed Hichem Mortad

University of Oran, Algeria

World Scientific
NEW JERSEY • LONDON • SINGAPORE • BEIJING • SHANGHAI • HONG KONG • TA I P E I • CHENNAI
Published by
World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
5 Toh Tuck Link, Singapore 596224
USA office: 27 Warren Street, Suite 401-402, Hackensack, NJ 07601
UK office: 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mortad, Mohammed Hichem, 1978– author.
Introductory topology : exercises and solutions / by Mohammed Hichem Mortad (University of
Oran, Algeria).
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-9814583817 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Topology--Problems, exercises, etc. I. Title.
QA611.M677 2014
514.076--dc23
2014003079

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2014 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval
system now known or to be invented, without written permission from the publisher.

For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright Clearance
Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In this case permission to photocopy
is not required from the publisher.

Printed in Singapore
 Preface

Topology is a major area in mathematics. At an undergraduate

level, at a research level, and in many areas of mathematics (and even
outside mathematics in some cases), a good understanding of the basics
of the theory of general topology is required. Many students find the
course "Topology" (at least in the beginning) a bit confusing and not
too easy (even hard for some of them) to assimilate. It is like moving
to a different place where the habits are not as they used to be, but in
the end we know that we have to live there and get used to it. They are
usually quite familiar with the real line R and its properties. So when
they study topology they start to realize that not everything true in R
needs to remain true in an arbitrary topological space. For instance,
there are convergent sequences which have more than one limit, the
identity mapping is not always continuous, a normally convergent series
need not converge (although the latter is not within the scope of this
book). So in many references, they use the word "usual topology of R",
a topology in which things are as usual! while there are many other
"unusual topologies" where things are not so "usual"!
The present book offers a good introduction to basic general topol-
ogy throughout solved exercises and one of the main aims is to make
the understanding of topology an easy task to students by proposing
many different and interesting exercises with very detailed solutions,
something that it is not easy to find in another manuscript on the same
subject in the existing literature. Nevertheless, and in order that this
books gives its fruits, we do advise the reader (mainly the students) to
use the book in a clever way inasmuch as while the best way to learn
mathematics is by doing exercises, the worst way of doing exercises is to
read the solution without thinking about how to solve the exercises (at
least for some time). Accordingly, we strongly recommend the student
to attempt the exercises before consulting the solutions. As a Chinese
proverb says: If you give someone a fish, then you have given him to
eat for one day, but if you teach him fishing, then you have given him
food for everyday. So we hope the students are going to learn to "fish"
using this book.

v
vi PREFACE

The present manuscript is mainly intended for an undergraduate

course in general topology. It does not include algebraic and geometric
topologies. Other topics such as: nets, topologies of infinite products,
quotient topology, first countability, second countability and the Ti
separation axioms with i = 0, 3, 4, 5 are not considered either or are not
given much attention. It can be used by students as well as lecturers
and anyone who needs the basic tools of topology. Teaching this course
several times with many different exercises each year has allowed me to
collect all the exercises given in this book. I relied on many references
(I cannot remember all of them but most of them can be found in the
bibliography) in lectures and tutorials. If there is some source which I
have forgotten to mention, then I sincerely apologize for that.
Let us now say a few words about the contents of this book. The
exercises on the subjects covered in this book can be used for a one
semester course of 14 weeks.
The book is divided into two parts. In Part 1, each chapter (except
for the first one) contains five sections. They are:
(1) What You Need to Know: In this part, we briefly recall the
essential of notions and results which are needed for the exer-
cises. No proofs are given. We just note that this part cannot
in any case replace a detailed course on the subject. The reader
may also wish to consult the following references for further
reading: [1], [2], [3], [6], [7], [9], [10], [11], [13], [14], [15] and
[16].
(2) True or False: In this part some interesting questions are
proposed to the reader. They also contain common errors
which appear with different students almost every year. Thanks
to this section, students should hopefully avoid making many
silly mistakes. This part is an important back-up for the
"What You Need to Know" section. Readers may even find
some redundancy, but this is mainly because it is meant to
test their understanding.
(3) Exercises with Solutions: The major part and the core
of each chapter where many exercises are given with detailed
solutions.
(4) Tests: This section contains short questions given with just
answers or simply hints.
(5) More Exercises: In this part some unsolved exercises are pro-
posed to the interested reader.
In Part 2, the reader finds answers to the questions appearing in the
section "True or False" as well as solutions to Exercises and Tests.
 PREFACE vii

The prerequisites to use this book are basics of: functions of one
variable (some of several variables calculus is also welcome though not
very much), sequences and series, and set theory.
Since the terminology in topology is rich and may be different from
a book to another, we do encourage the readers to have a look at the
"Notations and Terminology" chapter to avoid an eventual confusion
or ambiguity with symbols and notations.
Before finishing, I welcome and I will be pleased to receive any sug-
gestions, questions (as well as pointing out eventual errors and typos)
from readers at my email: [email protected].
Last but not least, thanks are due in particular to Dr Lim Swee
Cheng and Ms Tan Rok Ting, and all the staff of World Scientific
Publishing Company for their patience and help.
Oran on September the 24th , 2013
Mohammed Hichem Mortad
Department of Mathematics
Faculty of Exact and Applied Sciences
The University of Oran (Algeria)
 Contents

Preface v
Notation and Terminology xiii
0.1. Notation xiii
0.2. Terminology xiv

Part 1. Exercises 1
Chapter 1. General Notions: Sets, Functions et al 3
1.1. What You Need to Know 3
1.2. Exercises With Solutions 4
1.3. More Exercises 6
Chapter 2. Metric Spaces 9
2.1. What You Need to Know 9
2.2. True or False: Questions 13
2.3. Exercises With Solutions 14
2.4. Tests 19
2.5. More Exercises 20
Chapter 3. Topological Spaces 23
3.1. What You Need to Know 23
3.2. True or False: Questions 29
3.3. Exercises With Solutions 32
3.4. Tests 39
3.5. More Exercises 40
Chapter 4. Continuity and Convergence 45
4.1. What You Need to Know 45
4.2. True or False: Questions 48
4.3. Exercises With Solutions 50
4.4. Tests 56
4.5. More Exercises 57
Chapter 5. Compact Spaces 61
5.1. What You Need to Know 61
ix
x CONTENTS

5.2. True or False: Questions 65

5.3. Exercises With Solutions 67
5.4. Tests 71
5.5. More Exercises 72
Chapter 6. Connected Spaces 75
6.1. What You Need to Know 75
6.2. True or False: Questions 78
6.3. Exercises With Solutions 79
6.4. Tests 81
6.5. More Exercises 81
Chapter 7. Complete Metric Spaces 83
7.1. What You Need to Know 83
7.2. True or False: Questions 85
7.3. Exercises With Solutions 87
7.4. Tests 91
7.5. More Exercises 91
Chapter 8. Function Spaces 95
8.1. What You Need to Know 95
8.2. True or False: Questions 98
8.3. Exercises With Solutions 99
8.4. Tests 100
8.5. More Exercises 100

Part 2. Solutions 103

Chapter 1. General Notions: Sets, Functions et al 105
1.2. Solutions to Exercises 105
Chapter 2. Metric Spaces 111
2.2. True or False: Answers 111
2.3. Solutions to Exercises 113
2.4. Hints/Answers to Tests 129
Chapter 3. Topological Spaces 131
3.2. True or False: Answers 131
3.3. Solutions to Exercises 137
3.4. Hints/Answers to Tests 160
Chapter 4. Continuity and Convergence 163
4.2. True or False: Answers 163
4.3. Solutions to Exercises 168
4.4. Hints/Answers to Tests 183
 CONTENTS xi

Chapter 5. Compact Spaces 185

5.2. True or False: Answers 185
5.3. Solutions to Exercises 188
5.4. Hints/Answers to Tests 203
Chapter 6. Connected Spaces 205
6.2. True or False: Answers 205
6.3. Solutions to Exercises 207
6.4. Hints/Answers to Tests 212
Chapter 7. Complete Metric Spaces 215
7.2. True or False: Answers 215
7.3. Solutions to Exercises 219
7.4. Hints/Answers to Tests 234
Chapter 8. Function Spaces 235
8.2. True or False: Answers 235
8.3. Solutions to Exercises 237
8.4. Hints/Answers to Tests 241
Bibliography 243
Index 245
 Notation and Terminology

0.1. Notation
• N is the set of natural numbers, i.e. N is the set {1, 2, · · · }
(note that N in the French literature contains 0 too).
• Z the set of all integers while Z+ is the set of positive numbers.
• Q the set of rational numbers.
• R the set of real numbers.
• C the set of complex numbers.
• [a, b] the closed interval with endpoints a and b.
• (a, b) the closed interval with endpoints a and b.
• (a, b) also denotes an ordered pair.
• i the complex square root of −1.
• x 7→ ex the usual exponential function.
• The complement of a set A in X is often denoted by Ac and
occasionally it is denoted by X \ A.
• The empty set is denoted by ∅.
• d(x, A) is the distance between a point x in X to a set A ⊂ X
where (X, d) is a metric space.
• d(A) is the diameter of a set A in a metric space (X, d).
• In a metric space (X, d), the open ball of radius r > 0 and
center x ∈ X is denoted by B(x, r).
• In a metric space (X, d), the closed ball of radius r > 0 and
center x ∈ X is denoted by Bc (x, r).
• In a metric space (X, d), the sphere of radius r > 0 and center
x ∈ X is denoted by S(x, r).
◦
• The interior of a set A in a topological space is denoted by A.
• The closure of a set A in a topological space is denoted by A.
• A′ denotes the derived set of A, that is the set of limit points
of A (where A is a subset of a topological space X).
• The frontier of a set is denoted by Fr.
• card denotes the cardinal number of a set.
• Rℓ is the lower limit topology.
• RK is the K-topology.

xiii
xiv NOTATION AND TERMINOLOGY

• The set of neighborhoods of a point x ∈ X, where X is a

topological space, is denoted by V(x).
• Cx denotes the (connected) component of x ∈ X where X is
a topological space.
• The real part of a complex number is denoted by Re.
• The imaginary part of a complex number is denoted by Im.
• The conjugate of a complex number z is denoted by z.
• C([0, 1]) is the space of real-valued continuous functions on
[0, 1] taking values in R. If the field of values is C, then this
will be clearly mentioned.
• C 1 ([0, 1]) is the space of real-valued continuous functions de-
fined on [0, 1], differentiable and having a continuous deriva-
tive.
• (R, | · |) is R equipped with the standard or the usual metric,
i.e. the absolute value function.
0.2. Terminology
• There is a general comment which should be remembered by
the reader. Except in the sections "True or False", if we say R
without specifying the topology or the metric, then this means
R endowed with its usual topology or metric. This applies to
C, Rn and Cn too.
• It will be comprehensible from the context whether "⊂" is for
comparing two sets or two topologies.
• It will be clear from the context whether (a, b) is the ordered
pair or the open interval.
• When it is not too important to specify the metric or the
topology, we simply say the topological (or metric ) space X.
• From time to time the reader will see "(why?)". In such a
case, this means that this a question whose answer should be
known by the reader. This is used by other authors such as
J. B. Conway (see [4]) and also M. Stoll (see [15]). Other
expressions such as "(is it not?)" are also used.
• A clopen set is a set that it is closed and open simultaneously.
• The letters "w.r.t." stand for with respect to.
• As it is used almost everywhere, "iff" means if and only if (for
the fun, the French use "ssi" for "si et seulement si". Even
in Arabic, it has been sorted out by doubling a letter in the
end!).
• WLOG, as it pleases many, stands for "without loss of gener-
ality".
 PART 1
EXERCISES
 CHAPTER 1

General Notions: Sets, Functions et al

1.1. What You Need to Know

In this section, we assume the reader is familiar with basic real
analysis including notions and results on sets and functions among
others. So we only recall results on countability.
Definition. A set A is called finite if it is empty or if there is a
bijection f : A → {1, 2, · · · , n}. A set is said to be infinite if it is not
finite.
Theorem. If a set A is finite, then there is no bijection of A with
any proper subset of A.
Example. The set N is infinite.
Definition. A set A is called countable (or denumerable) if
it is finite or if there is a bijection f : A → N. A set which is not
countable is called uncountable.
Example.
(1) The set of even integers is countable.
(2) Z is countable.
When looking for a bijection between N and a given set A, it may
happen that we find a function f which is injective but not surjective
and vice versa. The next result is therefore quite practical
Theorem. A non-empty set A is countable iff one of the following
holds:
(1) There exists an injective map f : A → N;
(2) There exists a surjective map g : N → A.
Proposition. If X is countable, then so is any A ⊂ X.
Theorem.
(1) A countable union of countable sets remains countable.
(2) A finite product of countable sets is also countable.
3
4 1. GENERAL NOTIONS: SETS, FUNCTIONS ET AL

Theorem. Let A be a non-empty set, and let P(A) be the set of

all subsets of A. Then there si no injective map f : P(A) → A
Corollary. P(N) is uncountable.
We finish this section with an important set in analysis. To define
it, consider first the set A0 = [0, 1]. The set A1 is obtained from A0 be
removing the middle third interval ( 13 , 32 ). To obtain A2 , remove from
A1 its middle thirds, namely ( 91 , 29 ) and ( 79 , 89 ). Then set
[∞  
1 + 3p 2 + 3p
An = An−1 \ , .
p=0
3n 3n

Definition. The Cantor set, denoted by C, is the intersection

(over n ∈ N) of the An introduced just above, that is:
\
C= An .
n∈N

Remark. The Cantor set is uncountable as will be seen in later

chapters. Its topological properties will be considered throughout the
present manuscript.
In measure theory, the Cantor set constitutes an example of an
uncountable set with zero Lebesgue measure.

1.2. Exercises With Solutions

Exercise 1.2.1. Let I be an arbitrary set. Let f : X → Y and
g : Y → Z be two functions. Also assume that A, Ai ⊂ X and
B, Bi ⊂ Y . Show that the following statements hold
[ [
(1) f ( Ai ) = f (Ai );
i∈I
\ i∈I
\
(2) f ( Ai ) ⊆ f (Ai );
i∈I[ i∈I[
(3) f −1 ( Bi ) = f −1 (Bi );
i∈I
\ i∈I
\
(4) f ( Bi ) =
−1
f −1 (Bi );
i∈I i∈I
(5) f −1 (B c ) = [f −1 (B)]c ;
(6) (g ◦ f )−1 (A) = f −1 (g −1 (A));
(7) f (f −1 (A)) ⊂ A;
(8) B ⊂ f −1 (f (B)).
Exercise 1.2.2. Let f : X → Y be a function. If fA is the re-
striction of f to A ⊂ X, then show that for any subset U of X one
 1.2. EXERCISES WITH SOLUTIONS 5

has
fA−1 (U) = A ∩ f −1 (U).
Exercise 1.2.3.
(1) Show, using the map
f :N×N→N
(n, m) 7→ f (n, m) = 2n 3m ,
that N × N is countable.
(2) Deduce that if A and B are two countable sets, then so is their
Cartesian product A × B.
Exercise 1.2.4. Let Q[X] be the set of polynomials with rational
coefficients. Show that Q[X] is countable.
Exercise 1.2.5. Let X = {0, 1}N be the set of all sequences having
values in {0, 1}. Show that X is uncountable.
Exercise1.2.6.  Show that
\ −1 1
(1) , = {0};
n∈N
n n
[
(2) [−n, n] = R;
n∈N
\
(3) [n, ∞) = ∅.
n∈N
\ [
Exercise 1.2.7. Let n ≥ 1. Find An and An in the following
n n
cases
(1) An = {1, 2, · · · , n};
(2) An = (−n, n);

(3) An =  − n1 , 1 +n1 ;
(4) An = 0, 1 −
n1 ;
(5) An = − n1 , 1 .
Exercise 1.2.8. [Young’s Inequality] Let a and b be two positive
real numbers. Let p > 1 and q > 1 be such that 1p + 1q = 1 (q is called
the conjugate of p). Show that we have
ap bq
ab ≤ + .
p q
Exercise 1.2.9. (A bit of number theory!) Show that e 6∈ Q (you
k=n
X 1
may use the sequences defined as xn = and yn = xn + n!n
1
).
k=0
k!
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
place, and sat down among the policemen, to whom I authorized my
intrusion by taking my notebook from my pocket. I have some hopes
that the spectators thought me a detective in plain clothes, and
revered me accordingly. There was such a person near me, with his
club sticking out of his back-pocket, whom I am sure I revered.
I had not come to report the events of this session of the court, but
to refresh the impressions of my first visit, and I was glad to find
them so just. There was, of course, some little change; but the same
magistrate was there, serene, patient, mercifully inclined of visage;
the colored attorney was there, in charge, as before, of a disastrous
Irish case. The officials who tried to keep order had put off their
flannel coats for coats of seersucker, and each carried a Japanese
fan; neither wore a collar, now, and I fancied them both a little more
in flesh. I think they were even less successful than formerly in
quelling disturbances, though they were even more polished in the
terms of their appeal. “Too much conversation in the court!” they
called out to us collectively. “Conversation must cease,” they added.
Then one, walking up to a benchful of voluble witnesses, would say,
“Must cease that conversation,” and to my fellow-policemen, “Less
conversation, gentlemen;” then again to the room at large, “Stop all
conversation in the court,” and “All conversation must cease entirely.”
The Irish case, which presently came on, was a question of assault
and battery between Mrs. O’Hara and Mrs. MacMannis; it had finally
to be dismissed, after much testimony to the guilt and peaceable
character of both parties. A dozen or more witnesses, were called,
principally young girls, who had come in their best, and with whom
one could fancy this an occasion of present satisfying excitement
and future celebrity. The witnesses were generally more interesting
than the parties to the suits, I thought, and I could not get tired of
my fellow-spectators, I suppose, if I went a great many times. I
liked to consider the hungry gravity of their countenances, as they
listened to the facts elicited, and to speculate as to the ultimate
effect upon their moral natures—or their immoral natures—of the
gross and palpable shocks daily imparted to them by the details of
vice and crime. I have tried to treat my material lightly and
entertainingly, as a true reporter should, but I would not have my
reader suppose that I did not feel the essential cruelty of an
exhibition that tore its poor rags from all that squalid shame, and its
mask from all that lying, cowering guilt, or did not suspect how it
must harden and deprave those whom it daily entertained. As I
dwelt upon the dull visages of the spectators, certain spectacles
vaguely related themselves to what I saw: the women who sat and
knitted at the sessions of the Revolutionary tribunals of Paris, and
overwhelmed with their clamor the judges’ feeble impulses to mercy;
the roaring populace at the Spanish bull-fight and the Roman arena.
Here the same elements were held in absolute silence,—debarred
even from “conversation,”—but it was impossible not to feel that
here in degree were the conditions that trained men to demand
blood, to rave for the guillotine, to turn down the thumb. This
procession of misdeeds, passing under their eyes day after day, must
leave a miasm of moral death behind it which no prison or work-
house can hereafter cure. We all know that the genius of our law is
publicity; but it may be questioned whether criminal trials may not
be as profitably kept private as hangings, the popular attendance on
which was once supposed to be a bulwark of religion and morality.

IX.
Not that there was any avoidable brutality, or even indecorum, in the
conduct of the trials that I saw. A spade was necessarily called a
spade; but it seemed to me that with all the lapse of time and
foreign alloy the old Puritan seriousness was making itself felt even
here, and subduing the tone of the procedure to a grave decency
consonant with the inquiries of justice. For it was really justice that
was administered, so far as I could see; and justice that was by no
means blind, but very open-eyed and keen-sighted. The causes were
decided by one man, from evidence usually extracted out of writhing
reluctance or abysmal stupidity, and the judgment must be formed
and the sentence given where the magistrate sat, amid the
confusion of the crowded room. Yet, except in the case of my poor
thief, I did not see him hesitate; and I did not doubt his wisdom
even in that case. His decisions seemed to me the result of most
patient and wonderfully rapid cogitation, and in dealing with the
witnesses he never lost his temper amid densities of dullness which
it is quite impossible to do more than indicate. If it were necessary,
for example, to establish the fact that a handkerchief was white, it
was not to be done without some such colloquy as this:—
“Was it a white handkerchief?”
“Sor?”
“Was the handkerchief white?”
“Was it white, sor?”
“Yes, was it white?”
“Was what white, sor?”
“The handkerchief,—was the handkerchief white?”
“What handkerchief, sor?”
“The handkerchief you just mentioned,—the handkerchief that the
defendant dropped.”
“I didn’t see it, sor.”
“Didn’t see the handkerchief?”
“Didn’t see him drop it, sor.”
“Well, did you see the handkerchief?”
“The handkerchief, sor? Oh, yes, sor! I saw it,—I saw the
handkerchief.”
“Well, was it white?”
“It was, sor.”
A boy who complained of another for assaulting him said that he
knocked him down.
“How did he knock you down?” asked the judge. “Did he knock you
down with his fist or his open hand?”
“Yes, sor.”
“Which did he do it with?”
“Put his arms round me and knocked me down.”
“Then he didn’t knock you down. He threw you down.”
“Yes, sor. He didn’t t’row me down. Put his arms round me and
knocked me down.”
It would be impossible to caricature these things, or to exaggerate
the charitable long-suffering that dealt with such cases. Sometimes,
as if in mere despair, the judge called the parties to him, and
questioned them privately; after which the case seemed to be
settled, without further trial.

X.
I have spoken of the theatrical illusion which the proceedings of the
court produced; but it often seemed to me also like a school where
bad boys and girls were brought up for punishment. They were,
indeed, like children, those poor offenders, and had a sort of
innocent simplicity in their wickedness, as good people have in their
goodness. One case came up on the occasion of my last visit, which
I should like to report verbatim in illustration, but it was of too lurid
a sort to be treated by native realism; we can only bear that sort
when imported; and undoubtedly there is something still to be said
in behalf of decency, at least in the English language. I can only hint
that this case was one which in some form or other has been coming
up in the police courts ever since police courts began. It must have
been familiar to those of Thebes three thousand years ago, and will
be so in those of cities which shall look back on Boston in an
antiquity as hoary. A hard-working old fool with a month’s pay in his
pocket and the lost soul with whom he carouses; the theft; the
quarrel between the lost soul and the yet more fallen spirit who
harbored her and traded at second hand in her perdition as to who
stole the fool’s money,—what stale materials! Yet I was as much
interested as if this were the first case of the kind, and, confronted
with the fool and the lost soul and the yet more fallen spirit, I could
not feel that they were—let me say it in all seriousness and
reverence—so very bad. Perhaps it was because they stood there
reduced to the very nakedness of their shame, and confessedly
guilty in what human nature struggles to the last to deny—stood
there, as a premise, far past the hope of lying—that they seemed
rather subjects for pity than abhorrence. The fool and the lost soul
were light and trivial; they even laughed at some of the grosser
facts; but that yet more fallen spirit was ghastly tragical, as bit by bit
the confession of her business was torn from her; it was torture that
seemed hideously out of proportion to any end to be attained; yet as
things are it had to be. If then and there some sort of redemption
might have begun!
The divine life which is in these poor creatures, as in the best and
purest, seemed to be struggling back to some relation and likeness
to our average sinful humanity, insisting that if socially and publicly
we denied it we should not hold it wholly outcast in our secret
hearts, nor refuse it our sympathy. Seeing that on their hopelessly
sunken level their common humanity kept that symmetry and
proportion which physical deformity shows, one could not doubt that
a distorted kindliness and good-nature remained to them in the
midst of their depravity: the man was like a gray-headed foolish boy;
the two women as simple and cunning as too naughty children. It
could be imagined that they had their friendly moments; that in
extremity they might care for each other; that even such a life as
theirs had its reliefs from perdition, as in disease there is relief from
pain, and no suffering, out of romance, is incessant. They had
certainly their decorums, their criterions. On their plane, everything
but the theft and the noisy quarrel was of custom and for granted;
but these were misdemeanors and disgraceful. Like another hostess
of the sort, the fallen spirit was aggrieved at these. “Do you think I
keep thieves in my house?... The tithe of a hair was never lost in my
house before.... I’ll no swaggerers.... There comes no swaggering
here.... I will bar no honest man my house, nor no cheater; but I do
not love swaggering.” This is the sum of what she said that she had
said in rebuke of the lost soul; that thieving and that swaggering,
they incensed her, and roused in her all the instincts of a moral and
respectable person. Humanity adjusts itself to all conditions, and
doubtless God forsakes it in none, but still shapes it to some
semblance of health in its sickness, of order in its disorder, of
righteousness in its sin.
I dare say that it was not a wholesome feeling, this leniency that
acquaintance with sinners produces. There is much to be urged on
that side, and I would like to urge it in considering the effect of daily
attendance at the police court upon these spectators whom I have
tried to study for the reader’s advantage. I must own that the trial at
which I have hinted did not affect them seriously, and I doubt if they
psychologized upon it. They craned their necks forward and gloated
on those women with an unmistakably obscene delight. If they were
not beyond being the worse for anything, they were the worse for
that trial. Why were they present? Theoretically, perhaps to see that
justice was done. But if justice had not been done, how could they
have helped it? The public shame seemed purely depraving both to
those who suffered it and to those who saw it; and it ought to have
been no part of the punishment inflicted. It was horrible, and it
sometimes befell those who were accused of nothing, but were
merely there to be tortured as witnesses. The lawyer who forced
that wretched hostess to confess the character of her house used no
unfair means, and he dealt with her as sparingly as he might; yet it
was still a shocking spectacle; for she was, curiously enough, not
lost to shame, but most alive to it, and, standing there before that
brutal crowd, gave up her name to infamy, with atrocious pain and
hate; her face was such a visage as hell-fire might flash into sight
among the newly damned, but such as our familiar and respectable
sunlight would do well not to reveal to any eyes but magistrates’ and
priests’. Till one has seen such a thing it is incredible that it should
be, and then incredible that it should possibly be of daily occurrence.
It was as if the physicians in charge of a public hospital should
permit that rabble to be present at a clinique for some loathsome
disease, to see that there was no malpractice. If the whole trial
could have taken place with closed doors, and with none present but
the parties, the lawyers, and the court, what possible harm could
have been done? I think none whatever, and I am so sure of this
that I would not only have all the police trials secret, but I would
never have another police report in print—after this! Then the
decency of mystery, and perhaps something of its awe, would
surround the vulgar shame and terror of the police court, and a
system which does no good would at least do less harm than at
present.

XI.
It will be perceived that, like all reformers, I am going too far. I
begin with demanding secrecy in police trials, and I end by
suggesting that they be abolished altogether. But in fact nothing
struck me more forcibly in the proceedings of the police court than
their apparent futility. It was all a mere suppression of symptoms in
the vicious classes, not a cure. This one or that one would not steal,
or assault and batter, for the given term of his imprisonment, but
this was ludicrously far from touching even the tendency to theft and
violence. These bad boys and girls came up and had their thrashing
or their rap over the knuckles, and were practically bidden by the
conditions of our civilization to go and sin some more. Perhaps there
is no cure for vice and crime. Perhaps there is nothing but
prevention, in the application of which there is always difficulty,
obscurity, and uncertainty.
The other day, as I passed the court-house, that sad vehicle which is
called the Black Maria was driving away from the high portal into
which it backs to receive its dead. (The word came inevitably; it is
not so far wrong, and it may stand.) The Black Maria may still be
Maria (the reason why it should ever have been I do not know), but
it is black no longer. On the contrary, it is painted a not uncheerful
salmon color, with its false sash picked out in drab; and at first
glance, among the rattling express wagons, it looked not unlike an
omnibus of the living, and could have passed through the street
without making the casual observer realize what a dreary hearse it
was. I dare say it was on its way to the House of Industry, or the
House of Correction, or Deer Island, or some of those places where
people are put to go from bad to worse; and it was fulfilling its
function with a merciful privacy, for its load of convicts might have
been dragged through the streets on open hurdles, for the further
edification of the populace. Yet I could not help thinking—or perhaps
the thought only occurs to me now—that for all reasonable hope as
to the future of its inmates the Black Maria might as well have been
fitted with one of those ingenious pieces of mechanism sometimes
employed by the Enemies of Society, and driven out to some wide,
open space where the explosion could do no harm to the vicinity,
and so when the horses and driver had removed to a safe distance—
But this is perhaps pessimism.
It is very hard to say what pessimism really is, and almost any
honest expression concerning the monotonous endeavor and failure
of society to repress the monotonous evolution of the criminal in
conditions that render his evolution inevitable, must seem
pessimistic. I do not suppose that we ought to kill him merely
because we cannot hope to cure him, though society goes to this
extreme in certain extreme cases. Is it right to kill the criminal at
one stage of his career, and not at another? After the first conviction
the rest is inevitable, and each succeeding conviction follows as a
matter of course. A bleaker pessimist than myself might say that all
criminal courts seem to be part of the process in the evolution of the
criminal. Still, criminal courts must be.
 I TALK OF DREAMS.
But it is mostly my own dreams I talk of, and that will somewhat
excuse me for talking of dreams at all. Every one knows how
delightful the dreams are that one dreams one’s self, and how insipid
the dreams of others are. I had an illustration of the fact, not many
evenings ago, when a company of us got telling dreams. I had by far
the best dreams of any; to be quite frank, mine were the only
dreams worth listening to; they were richly imaginative, delicately
fantastic, exquisitely whimsical, and humorous in the last degree;
and I wondered that when the rest could have listened to them they
were always eager to cut in with some silly, senseless, tasteless
thing, that made me sorry and ashamed for them. I shall not be
going too far if I say that it was on their part the grossest betrayal of
vanity that I ever witnessed.
But the egotism of some people concerning their dreams is almost
incredible. They will come down to breakfast and bore everybody
with a recital of the nonsense that has passed through their brains in
sleep, as if they were not bad enough when they were awake; they
will not spare the slightest detail; and if, by the mercy of Heaven,
they have forgotten something, they will be sure to recollect it, and
go back and give it all over again with added circumstance. Such
people do not reflect that there is something so purely and intensely
personal in dreams that they can rarely interest any one but the
dreamer, and that to the dearest friend, the closest relation or
connection, they can seldom be otherwise than tedious and
impertinent. The habit husbands and wives have of making one
another listen to their dreams is especially cruel. They have each
other quite helpless, and for this reason they should all the more
carefully guard themselves from abusing their advantage. Parents
should not afflict their offspring with the rehearsal of their mental
maunderings in sleep, and children should learn that one of the first
duties a child owes its parents is to spare them the anguish of
hearing what it has dreamed about overnight. A like forbearance in
regard to the community at large should be taught as the first trait
of good manners in the public schools, if we ever come to teach
good manners there.

I.
Certain exceptional dreams, however, are so imperatively significant,
so vitally important, that it would be wrong to withhold them from
the knowledge of those who happened not to dream them, and I
feel some such quality in my own dreams so strongly that I could
scarcely forgive myself if I did not, however briefly, impart them. It
was only the last week, for instance, that I found myself one night in
the company of the Duke of Wellington, the great Duke, the Iron
one, in fact; and after a few moments of agreeable conversation on
topics of interest among gentlemen, his Grace said that now, if I
pleased, he would like a couple of those towels. We had not been
speaking of towels, that I remember, but it seemed the most natural
thing in the world that he should mention them in the connection,
whatever it was, and I went at once to get them for him. At the
place where they gave out towels, and where I found some very civil
people, they told me that what I wanted was not towels, and they
gave me instead two bath-gowns, of rather scanty measure,
butternut in color and Turkish in texture. The garments made
somehow a very strong impression upon me, so that I could draw
them now, if I could draw anything, as they looked when they were
held up to me. At the same moment, for no reason that I can allege,
I passed from a social to a menial relation to the Duke, and foresaw
that when I went back to him with these bath-gowns he would not
thank me as one gentleman would another, but would offer me a tip
as if I were a servant. This gave me no trouble, for I at once
dramatized a little scene between myself and the Duke, in which I
should bring him the bath-gowns, and he should offer me the tip,
and I should refuse it with a low bow, and say that I was an
American. What I did not dramatize, or what seemed to enter into
the dialogue quite without my agency, was the Duke’s reply to my
proud speech. It was foreshown me that he would say, He did not
see why that should make any difference. I suppose it was in the
hurt I felt at this wound to our national dignity that I now instantly
invented the society of some ladies, whom I told of my business with
those bath-gowns (I still had them in my hands), and urged them to
go with me and call upon the Duke. They expressed, somehow, that
they would rather not, and then I urged that the Duke was very
handsome. This seemed to end the whole affair, and I passed on to
other visions, which I cannot recall.
I have not often had a dream of such international import, in the
offence offered through me to the American character, and its well-
known superiority to tips, but I have had others quite as humiliating
to me personally. In fact, I am rather in the habit of having such
dreams, and I think I may not unjustly attribute to them the
disciplined modesty which the reader will hardly fail to detect in the
present essay. It has more than once been my fate to find myself
during sleep in battle, where I behave with so little courage as to
bring discredit upon our flag and shame upon myself. In these
circumstances I am not anxious to make even a showing of courage;
my one thought is to get away as rapidly and safely as possible. It is
said that this is really the wish of all novices under fire, and that the
difference between a hero and a coward is that the hero hides it,
with a duplicity which finally does him honor, and that the coward
frankly runs away. I have never really been in battle, and if it is
anything like a battle in dreams, I would not willingly qualify myself
to speak by the card on this point. Neither have I ever really been
upon the stage, but in dreams I have often been there, and always
in a great trouble of mind at not knowing my part. It seems a little
odd that I should not sometimes be prepared, but I never am, and I
feel that when the curtain rises I shall be disgraced beyond all
reprieve. I dare say it is the suffering from this that awakens me in
time, or changes the current of my dreams so that I have never yet
been actually hooted from the stage.
 II.
But I do not so much object to these ordeals as to some social
experiences which I have in dreams. I cannot understand why one
should dream of being slighted or snubbed in society, but this is
what I have done more than once, though never perhaps so signally
as in the instance I am about to give. I found myself in a large
room, where people were sitting at lunch or supper around small
tables, as is the custom, I am told, at parties in the houses of our
nobility and gentry. I was feeling very well; not too proud, I hope,
but in harmony with the time and place. I was very well dressed, for
me; and as I stood talking to some ladies at one of the tables I was
saying some rather brilliant things, for me; I lounged easily on one
foot, as I have observed men of fashion do, and as I talked, I flipped
my gloves, which I held in one hand, across the other; I remember
thinking that this was a peculiarly distinguished action. Upon the
whole I comported myself like one in the habit of such affairs, and I
turned to walk away to another table, very well satisfied with myself
and with the effect of my splendor upon the ladies. But I had got
only a few paces off when I perceived (I could not see with my back
turned) one of the ladies lean forward, and heard her say to the rest
in a tone of killing condescension and patronage, “I don’t see why
that person isn’t as well as another.”
I say that I do not like this sort of dreams, and I never would have
them if I could help. They make me ask myself if I am really such a
snob when I am waking, and this in itself is very unpleasant. If I am,
I cannot help hoping that it will not be found out; and in my dreams
I am always less sorry for the misdeeds I commit than for their
possible discovery. I have done some very bad things in dreams
which I have no concern for whatever, except as they seem to
threaten me with publicity, or bring me within the penalty of the law;
and I believe this is the attitude of most other criminals, remorse
being a fiction of the poets, according to the students of the criminal
class. It is not agreeable to bring this home to one’s self, but the fact
is not without its significance in another direction. It implies that
both in the case of the dream-criminal and the deed-criminal there is
perhaps the same taint of insanity; only in the deed-criminal it is
active, and in the dream-criminal it is passive. In both, the inhibitory
clause that forbids evil is off, but the dreamer is not bidden to do evil
as the maniac is, or as the malefactor often seems to be. The
dreamer is purely unmoral; good and bad are the same to his
conscience; he has no more to do with right and wrong than the
animals; he is reduced to the state of the merely natural man; and
perhaps the primitive men were really like what we all are now in
our dreams. Perhaps all life to them was merely dreaming, and they
never had anything like our waking consciousness, which seems to
be the offspring of conscience, or else the parent of it. Until men
passed the first stage of being, perhaps that which we call the soul,
for want of a better name, or a worse, could hardly have existed,
and perhaps in dreams the soul is mostly absent now. The soul, or
the principle that we call the soul, is the supernal criticism of the
deeds done in the body, which goes perpetually on in the waking
mind. While this watches, and warns or commands, we go right; but
when it is off duty we go neither right nor wrong, but are as the
beasts that perish.
A common theory is that the dreams which we remember are those
we have in the drowse which precedes sleeping and waking; but I
do not altogether accept this theory. In fact, there is very little proof
of it. We often wake from a dream, literally, but there is no proof
that we did not dream in the middle of the night the dream which is
quite as vividly with us in the morning as the one we wake from. I
should think that the dream which has some color of conscience in it
was the drowse-dream, and that the dream which has none is the
sleep-dream; and I believe that the most of our dreams will be
found by this test to be sleep-dreams. It is in these we may know
what we would be without our souls, without their supernal criticism
of the mind; for the mind keeps on working in them, with the lights
of waking knowledge, both experience and observation, but
ruthlessly, remorselessly. By them we may know what the state of
the habitual criminal is, what the state of the lunatic, the animal, the
devil is. In them the personal character ceases; the dreamer is
remanded to his type.

III.
It is very strange, in the matter of dreadful dreams, how the body of
the terror is, in the course of often dreaming, reduced to a mere
convention. For a long time I was tormented with a nightmare of
burglars, and at first I used to dramatize the whole affair in detail,
from the time the burglars approached the house, till they mounted
the stairs, and the light of their dark-lanterns shone under the door
into my room. Now I have blue-pencilled all that introductory detail;
I have a light shining in under my door at once; I know that it is my
old burglars; and I have the effect of nightmare without further
ceremony. There are other nightmares that still cost me a great deal
of trouble in their construction, as for instance the nightmare of
clinging to the face of a precipice or the eaves of a lofty building; I
have to take as much pains with the arrangement of these as if I
were now dreaming them for the first time, and were hardly more
than an apprentice in the business.
Perhaps the most universal dream of all is that disgraceful dream of
appearing in public places, and in society, with very little or nothing
on. This dream spares neither age nor sex, I believe, and I dare say
the innocency of wordless infancy is abused by it, and dotage
pursued to the tomb. I have not the least doubt Adam and Eve had
it in Eden; though up to the moment the fig-leaf came in, it is
difficult to imagine just what plight they found themselves in that
seemed improper; probably there was some plight. The most
amusing thing about this dream is the sort of defensive process that
goes on in the mind, in search of self-justification or explanation. Is
there not some peculiar circumstance or special condition, in whose
virtue it is wholly right and proper for one to come to a fashionable
assembly clad simply in a towel, or to go about the street in nothing
but a pair of kid gloves, or of pyjamas at the most? This, or
something like it, the mind of the dreamer struggles to establish,
with a good deal of anxious appeal to the bystanders and a final
sense of the hopelessness of the cause.
One may easily laugh off this sort of dream in the morning, but
there are other shameful dreams, whose inculpation projects itself
far into the day, and whose infamy often lingers about one till lunch-
time. Every one, nearly, has had them, but it is not the kind of
dream that any one is fond of telling: the gross vanity of the most
besotted dream-teller keeps that sort back. During the forenoon, at
least, the victim goes about with the dim question whether he is not
really that kind of man harassing him, and a sort of remote fear that
he may be. I fancy that as to his nature and as to his mind, he is so,
and that but for the supernal criticism, but for his soul, he might be
that kind of man in very act and deed.
The dreams we sometimes have about other people are not without
a curious suggestion; and the superstitious (of those superstitious
who like to invent their own superstitions) might very well imagine
that the persons dreamed of had a witting complicity in their facts,
as well as the dreamer. This is a conjecture that must of course not
be forced to any conclusion. One must not go to one of these
persons and ask, however much one would like to ask, “Sir, have you
no recollection of such and such a thing, at such and such a time
and place, which happened to us in my dream?” Any such person
would be fully justified in not answering the question. It would be, of
all interviewing, the most intolerable species. Yet a singular interest,
a curiosity not altogether indefensible, will attach to these persons in
the dreamer’s mind, and he will not be without the sense, ever after,
that he and they have a secret in common. This is dreadful, but the
only thing that I can think to do about it is to urge people to keep
out of other people’s dreams by every means in their power.

IV.
There are things in dreams very awful, which would not be at all so
in waking; quite witless and aimless things, which at the time were
of such baleful effect that it remains forever. I remember dreaming
when I was quite a small boy, not more than ten years old, a dream
which is vivider in my mind now than anything that happened at the
time. I suppose it came remotely from my reading of certain Tales of
the Grotesque and the Arabesque, which had just then fallen into my
hands; and it involved simply an action of the fire-company in the
little town where I lived. They were working the brakes of the old
fire-engine, which would seldom respond to their efforts, and as
their hands rose and fell they set up the heart-shaking and soul-
desolating cry of “Arms Poe, arms Poe, arms Poe!” This and nothing
more was the body of my horror; and if the reader is not moved by
it the fault is his and not mine; for I can assure him that nothing in
my experience has been more dreadful to me.
I can hardly except the dismaying apparition of a clown, whom I
once saw, somewhat later in life, rise through the air in a sitting
posture, and float lightly over the house-roof, snapping his fingers,
and vaguely smiling, while the antennæ on his forehead, which
clowns have in common with some other insects, nodded elastically.
I do not know why this portent should have been so terrifying, or
indeed that it was a portent at all, for nothing ever came of it; what
I know is that it was to the last degree threatening and awful. I
never got anything but joy out of the circuses where this dream
must have originated, but the pantomime of Don Giovanni, which I
saw at the theatre, was as grewsome to me waking as it was to me
dreaming. The statue of the Commendatore, in getting down from
his horse to pursue the wicked hero (I think that is what he gets
down for), set an example by which a long line of statues afterwards
profited in my dreams. For many years, and I do not know but quite
up to the time when I adopted burglars as the theme of my
nightmares, I was almost always chased by a marble statue with an
uplifted arm, and almost always I ran along the verge of a pond to
escape it. I believe that I got this pond out of my remote childhood,
and that it may have been a fish-pond embowered by weeping-
willows which I used to admire in the door-yard of a neighbor. I have
somehow a greater respect for the material of this earlier nightmare
than I have for that of the later ones, and no doubt the reader will
agree with me that it is much more romantic to be pursued by a
statue than to be threatened by burglars. It is but a few hours ago,
however, that I saved myself from these inveterate enemies by
waking up just in time for breakfast. They did not come with that
light of dark-lanterns shining under the door, or I should have known
them at once, and not had so much bother; but they intimated their
presence in the catch of the lock, which would not close securely,
and there was some question at first whether they were not ghosts.
I thought of tying the door-knob on the inside of my room to my
bedpost (a bedpost that has not been in existence for fifty years),
but after suffering awhile I decided to speak to them from an upper
window. By this time they had turned into a trio of harmless,
necessary tramps, and at my appeal to them, absolutely nonsensical
as I now believe it to have been, to regard the peculiar
circumstances, whatever they were or were not, they did really get
up from the back porch where they were seated and go quietly
away.
Burglars are not always so easily to be entreated. On one occasion,
when I found a party of them digging at the corner of my house on
Concord Avenue in Cambridge, and opened the window over them
to expostulate, the leader looked up at me in well-affected surprise.
He lifted his hand, with a twenty-dollar note in it, toward me, and
said: “Oh! Can you change me a twenty-dollar bill?” I expressed a
polite regret that I had not so much money about me, and then he
said to the rest, “Go ahead, boys,” and they went on undermining
my house. I do not know what came of it all.
Of ghosts I have seldom dreamed, so far as I can remember; in fact,
I have never dreamed of the kind of ghosts that we are all more or
less afraid of, though I have dreamed rather often of the spirits of
departed friends. But I once dreamed of dying, and the reader, who
has never died yet, may be interested to know what it is like.
According to this experience of mine, which I do not claim is typical,
it is like a fire kindling in an air-tight stove with paper and shavings;
the gathering smoke and gases suddenly burst into flame, and puff
the door out, and all is over.
I have not yet been led to execution for the many crimes I have
committed in my dreams, but I was once in the hands of a barber,
who added to the shaving and shampooing business the art of
removing his customers’ heads in treatment for headache. As I took
my seat in his chair I had some lingering doubts as to the effect of a
treatment so drastic, and I ventured to mention the case of a friend
of mine, a gentleman somewhat eminent in the law, who after
several weeks was still going about without his head. The barber did
not attempt to refute my position. He merely said, “Oh, well, he had
such a very thick sort of a head, anyway.”
This was a sarcasm, but I think it was urged as a reason, though it
may not have been. We rarely bring away from sleep the things that
seem so brilliant to us in our dreams. Verse is especially apt to fade
away, or turn into doggerel in the memory, and the witty sayings
which we contrive to remember will hardly bear the test of daylight.
The most perfect thing of the kind out of my own dreams was
something that I seemed to wake with the very sound of in my ears.
It was after a certain dinner, which had been rather uncommonly
gay, with a good deal of very good talk, which seemed to go on all
night, and when I woke in the morning some one was saying, “Oh, I
shouldn’t at all mind his robbing Peter to pay Paul, if I felt sure that
Paul would get the money.” This I think really humorous, and an
extremely neat bit of characterization; I feel free to praise it,
because it was not I who said it.

V.
Apparently the greater part of dreams have no more mirth than
sense in them. This is perhaps because the man is in dreams
reduced to the brute condition, and is the lawless inferior of the
waking man intellectually, as the lawless in waking are always the
inferiors of the lawful. Some loose thinkers suppose that if we give
the rein to imagination it will do great things, but it will really do
little things, foolish and worthless things, as we witness in dreams,
where it is quite unbridled. It must keep close to truth, and it must
be under the law if it would work strongly and sanely. The man in
his dreams is really lower than the lunatic in his deliriums. These
have a logic of their own; but the dreamer has not even a crazy
logic.
“Like a dog, he hunts in dreams,”
and probably his dreams and the dog’s are not only alike, but are of
the same quality. In his wicked dreams the man is not only animal,
he is devil, so wholly is he let into his evils, as the Swedenborgians
say. The wrong is indifferent to him until the fear of detection and
punishment steals in upon him. Even then he is not sorry for his
misdeed, as I have said before; he is only anxious to escape its
consequences.
It seems probable that when this fear makes itself felt he is near to
waking; and probably when we dream, as we often do, that the
thing is only a dream, and hope for rescue from it by waking, we are
always just about to wake. This double effect is very strange, but
still more strange is the effect which we are privy to in the minds of
others, when they not merely say things to us which are wholly
unexpected, but think things that we know they are thinking, and
that they do not express in words. A great many years ago, when I
was young, I dreamed that my father, who was in another town,
came into the room where I was really lying asleep, and stood by my
bed. He wished to greet me, after our separation, but he reasoned
that if he did so, I should wake, and he turned and left the room
without touching me. This process in his mind, which I knew as
clearly and accurately as if it had apparently gone on in my own,
was apparently confined to his mind as absolutely as anything could
be that was not spoken or in any wise uttered.
Of course it was of my agency, like any other part of the dream, and
it was something like the operation of the novelist’s intention
through the mind of his characters. But in this there is the author’s
consciousness that he is doing it all himself, while in my dream, this
reasoning in the mind of another was something that I felt myself
mere witness of. In fact there is no analogy, so far as I can make
out, between the process of literary invention and the process of
dreaming. In the invention, the critical faculty is vividly and
constantly alert; in dreaming, it seems altogether absent. It seems
absent, too, in what we call day-dreaming, or that sort of
dramatizing action which perhaps goes on perpetually in the mind,
or some minds. But this day-dreaming is not otherwise any more like
night-dreaming than invention is; for the man is never more actively
and consciously a man, and never has a greater will to be fine and
high and grand than in his day-dreams, while in his night-dreams he
is quite willing to be a miscreant of any worst sort.
It is very remarkable, in view of this fact, that we have now and
then, though ever so much more rarely, dreams that are as angelic
as those others are demoniac. Is it possible that then the dreamer is
let into his goods (the word is Swedenborg’s again), instead of his
evils? It may be supposed that in sleep the dreamer lies passive,
while his proper soul is away, and other spirits, celestial and infernal,
have free access to his mind, and abuse it to their own ends in the
one case, and use it in his behalf in the other.
That would be an explanation, but nothing seems quite to hold in
regard to dreams. If it is true, why should the dreamer’s state so
much oftener be imbued with evil than with good? It might be
answered that the evil forces are much more positive and aggressive
than the good; or, that the love of the dreamer, which is his life,
being mainly evil, invites the wicked spirits oftener. But that is a
point which I would rather leave each dreamer to settle for himself.
The greater number of every one’s dreams, like the romantic novel, I
fancy, concern incident rather than character, and I am not sure,
after all, that the dream which convicts the dreamer of an essential
baseness is commoner than the dream that tells in his favor morally.
I dare say every reader of this paper has had dreams so amusing
that he has wakened himself from them by laughing, and then not
found them so very funny, or perhaps not been able to recall them
at all. I have had at least one of this sort, remarkable for other
reasons, which remains perfect in my mind, though it is now some
ten years old. One of the children had been exposed to a very
remote chance of scarlet-fever at the house of a friend, and had
been duly scolded for the risk, which was then quite forgotten. I
dreamed that this friend, however, was giving a ladies’ lunch, at
which I was unaccountably and invisibly present, and the talk began
to run upon the scarlet-fever cases in her family. She said that after
the last she had fumigated the whole house for seventy-two hours
(the period seemed very significant and important in my dream),
and had burned everything she could lay her hands on.
“And what did the nurse burn?” asked one of the other ladies.
The hostess began to laugh: “The nurse didn’t burn a thing!”
Then all the rest burst out laughing at the joke, and the laughter
woke me, to see the boy sitting up in his bed, and hear him saying,
“Oh, I am so sick!”
It was the nausea which announces scarlet-fever, and for six weeks
after that we were in quarantine. Very likely the fear of the
contagion had been in my nether mind all the time, but, so far as
consciousness could testify of it, I had wholly forgotten it.

VI.
One rarely loses one’s personality in dreams; it is rather intensified,
with all the proper circumstances and relations of it, but I have had
at least one dream in which I seemed to transcend my own
circumstance and condition with remarkable completeness. Even my
epoch, my precious present, I left behind (or ahead, rather), and in
my unity with the persons of my dream I became strictly mediæval.
In fact, I have always called it my mediæval dream, to such as I
could get to listen to it; and it had for its scene a feudal tower, in
some waste place; a tower open at the top, and with a deep, clear
pool of water at the bottom, so that it instantly became known to
me, as if I had always known it, for the Pool Tower. While I stood
looking into it, in a mediæval dress and a mediæval mood, there
came flying in at the open door of the ruin beside me the duke’s
hunchback, and after him, furious and shrieking maledictions, the
swarthy beauty whom I was aware the duke was tired of. The
keeping was now not only ducal, but thoroughly Italian, and it was
suggested somehow to my own subtle Italian perception that the
hunchback had been set on to tease the girl, and provoke her so
that she would turn upon him, and try to wreak her fury on him, and
chase him into the Pool Tower, and up the stone stairs that wound
round its hollow to the top, where the solemn sky showed. The
fearful spire of the steps was unguarded, and when I had lost the
pair from sight, with the dwarf’s mocking laughter and the girl’s
angry cries in my ears, there came fluttering from the height, like a
bird wounded and whirling from a lofty tree, the figure of the girl,
while far aloof the hunchback peered over at her fall. Midway in her
descent her head struck against the edge of the steps, with a kish,
such as an egg-shell makes when broken against the edge of a
platter, and then plunged into the dark pool at my feet, where I
could presently see her lying in the clear depths, and the blood
curling upward from the wound in her skull, like a dark smoke. I was
not sensible of any great pity; I accepted the affair, quite
mediævally, as something that might very well have happened,
given the girl, the duke and the dwarf, and the time and place.
I am rather fond of a mediæval setting for those
“Dreams that wave before the half-shut eye,”
just closing for an afternoon nap. Then I invite to my vision a wide
landscape, with a cold wintry afternoon light upon it, and over this
plain I have bands and groups of people scurrying, in mediæval hose
of divers colors, and mediæval leathern jerkins, hugging themselves
against the frost, and very miserable. They affect me with a
profound compassion; they represent to me, somehow, the vast
mass of humanity, the mass that does the work, and earns the
bread, and goes cold and hungry through all the ages. I should be at
a loss to say why this was the effect, and I am utterly unable to say
why these fore-dreams, which I partially solicit, should have such a
tremendous significance as they seem to have. They are mostly of
the most evanescent and intangible character, but they have one
trait in common. They always involve the attribution of ethical
motive and quality to material things, and in their passage through
my brain they promise me a solution of the riddle of the painful
earth in the very instant when they are gone forever. They are of
innumerable multitude, chasing each other with the swiftness of
light, and never staying to be seized by the memory, which seems
already drugged with sleep before their course begins. One of these
dreams, indeed, I did capture, and I found it to be the figure 8, but
lying on its side, and in that posture involving the mystery and the
revelation of the mystery of the universe. I leave the reader to
imagine why.
As we grow older, I think we are less and less able to remember our
dreams. This is perhaps because the experience of youth is less
dense, and the empty spaces of the young consciousness are more
hospitable to these airy visitants. A few dreams of my later life stand
out in strong relief, but for the most part they blend in an
indistinguishable mass, and pass away with the actualities into a
common oblivion. I should say that they were more frequent with
me than they used to be; it seems to me that now I dream whole
nights through, and much more about the business of my waking life
than formerly. As I earn my living by weaving a certain sort of
dreams into literary form, it might be supposed that I would
sometime dream of the personages in these dreams, but I cannot
remember that I have ever done so. The two kinds of inventing, the
voluntary and the involuntary, seem absolutely and finally distinct.
Of the prophetic dreams which people sometimes have I have
mentioned the only one of mine which had any dramatic interest,
but I have verified in my own experience the theory of Ribot that
approaching disease sometimes intimates itself in dreams of the
disorder impending, before it is otherwise declared in the organism.
In actual sickness I think that I dream rather less than in health. I
had a malarial fever when I was a boy, and I had a sort of
continuous dream in it that distressed me greatly. It was of gliding
down the school-house stairs without touching my feet to the steps,
and this was indescribably appalling.
The anguish of mind that one suffers from the imaginary dangers of
dreams is probably of the same quality as that inspired by real peril
in waking. A curious proof of this happened within my knowledge
not many years ago. One of the neighbor’s children was coasting
down a long hill with a railroad at the foot of it, and as he neared
the bottom an express train rushed round the curve. The flag-man
ran forward and shouted to the boy to throw himself off his sled, but
he kept on, and ran into the locomotive, and was so hurt that he
died. His injuries, however, were to the spine, and they were of a
kind that rendered him insensible to pain while he lived. He talked
very clearly and calmly of his accident, and when he was asked why
he did not throw himself off his sled, as the flag-man bade him, he
said, “I thought it was a dream.” The reality had, through the mental
stress, no doubt transmuted itself to the very substance of dreams,
and he had felt the same kind and quality of suffering as he would
have done if he had been dreaming. The Norwegian poet and
novelist, Björnstjerne Björnson, was at my house shortly after this
happened, and he was greatly struck by the psychological
implications of the incident; it seemed to mean for him all sorts of
possibilities in the obscure realm where it cast a fitful light.
But such a glimmer soon fades, and the darkness thickens round us
again. It is not with the blindfold sense of sleep that we shall ever
find out the secret of life, I fancy, either in the dreams which seem
personal to us each one, or those universal dreams which we
apparently share with the whole race. Of the race-dream, as I may
call it, there is one hardly less common than that dream of going
about insufficiently clad, which I have already mentioned, and that is
the dream of suddenly falling from some height, and waking with a
start. The experience before the start is extremely dim, and latterly I
have condensed this dread almost as much as the preliminary
passages of my burglar-dream. I am aware of nothing but an instant
of danger, and then comes the jar or jolt that wakens me. Upon the
whole, I find this a great saving of emotion, and I do not know but
there is a tendency, as I grow older, to shorten up the detail of what
may be styled the conventional dream, the dream which we have so
often that it is like a story read before. Indeed, the plots of dreams
are not much more varied than the plots of romantic novels, which
are notoriously stale and hackneyed. It would be interesting, and
possibly important, if some observer would note the recurrence of
this sort of dreams, and classify their varieties. I think we should all
be astonished to find how few and slight the variations were.

VII.
If I come to speak of dreams concerning the dead, it must be with a
tenderness and awe that all who have had them will share with me.
Nothing is more remarkable in them than the fact that the dead,
though they are dead, yet live, and are, to our commerce with them,
quite like all other living persons. We may recognize, and they may
recognize, that they are no longer in the body, but they are as verily
living as we are. This may be merely an effect from the doctrine of
immortality which we all hold or have held, and yet I would fain
believe that it may be something like proof of it. No one really
knows, or can know, but one may at least hope, without offending
science, which indeed no longer frowns so darkly upon faith. This
persistence of life in those whom we mourn as dead, may not it be a
witness of the fact that the consciousness cannot accept the notion
of death at all, and,
 “Whatever crazy sorrow saith,”
that we have never truly felt them lost? Sometimes those who have
died come back in dreams as parts of a common life which seems
never to have been broken; the old circle is restored without a flaw;
but whether they do this, or whether it is acknowledged between
them and us that they have died, and are now disembodied spirits,
the effect of life is the same. Perhaps in those dreams they and we
are alike disembodied spirits, and the soul of the dreamer, which so
often seems to abandon the body to the animal, is then the
conscious entity, the thing which the dreamer feels to be himself,
and is mingling with the souls of the departed on something like the
terms which shall hereafter be constant.
I think very few of those who have lost their beloved have failed to
receive some sign or message from them in dreams, and often it is
of deep and abiding consolation. It may be that this is our anguish
compelling the echo of love out of the darkness where nothing is,
but it may be that there is something there, which answers to our
throe with pity and with longing like our own. Again, no one knows,
but in a matter impossible of definite solution I will not refuse the
comfort which belief can give. Unbelief can be no gain, and belief no
loss. But those dreams are so dear, so sacred, so interwoven with
the finest and tenderest tissues of our being that one cannot speak
of them freely, or indeed more than most vaguely. It is enough to
say that one has had them, and to know that almost every one else
has had them too. They seem to be among the universal dreams,
and a strange quality of them is, that though they deal with a fact of
universal doubt, they are, to my experience at least, not nearly so
fantastic or capricious as the dreams that deal with the facts of
every-day life, and with the affairs of people still in this world.
I do not know whether it is common to dream of faces or figures
strange to our waking knowledge, but occasionally I have done this.
I suppose it is much the same kind of invention that causes the
person we dream of to say or do a thing unexpected to us. But this
is rather common, and the creation of a novel aspect, the
physiognomy of a stranger, in the person we dream of, is rather rare.
In all my dreams I can recall but one presence of the kind. I have
never dreamed of any sort of monster foreign to my knowledge, or
even of any grotesque thing made up of elements familiar to it; the
grotesqueness has always been in the motive or circumstance of the
dream. I have very seldom dreamed of animals, though once, when
I was a boy, for a time after I had passed a corn-field where there
were some bundles of snakes, writhen and knotted together in the
cold of an early spring day, I had dreams infested by like images of
these loathsome reptiles. I suppose that every one has had dreams
of finding his way through unnamable filth, and of feeding upon
hideous carnage; these are clearly the punishment of gluttony, and
are the fumes of a rebellious stomach.
I have heard people say they have sometimes dreamed of a thing,
and awakened from their dream, and then fallen asleep and
dreamed of the same thing; but I believe that this is all one
continuous dream; that they did not really awaken, but only
dreamed that they awakened. I have never had any such dream, but
at one time I had a recurrent dream, which was so singular that I
thought no one else had ever had a recurrent dream till I proved
that it was rather common by starting the inquiry in the Contributors’
Club in the Atlantic Monthly, when I found that great numbers of
people have recurrent dreams. My own recurrent dreams began to
come during the first year of my consulate at Venice, where I had
hoped to find the same kind of poetic dimness on the phases of
American life, which I wished to treat in literature, as the distance in
time would have given. I should not wish any such dimness now;
but those were my romantic days, and I was sorely baffled by its
absence. The disappointment began to haunt my nights as well as
my days, and a dream repeated itself from week to week for a
matter of eight or ten months to one effect. I dreamed that I had
gone home to America, and that people met me and said, “Why, you
have given up your place!” and I always answered: “Certainly not; I
haven’t done at all what I mean to do there, yet. I am only here on
my ten days’ leave.” I meant the ten days which a consul might take
each quarter without applying to the Department of State; and then
I would reflect how impossible it was that I should make the visit in
that time. I saw that I should be found out, and dismissed from my
office and publicly disgraced. Then, suddenly, I was not consul at
Venice, and had not been, but consul at Delhi in India; and the
distress I felt would all end in a splendid Oriental phantasmagory of
elephants and native princes, with their retinues in procession, which
I suppose was mostly out of my reading of De Quincey. This dream,
with no variation that I can recall, persisted till I broke it up by
saying, in the morning after it had recurred, that I had dreamed that
dream again; and so it began to fade away, coming less and less
frequently, and at last ceasing altogether.
I am rather proud of that dream; it is really my battle-horse among
dreams, and I think I will ride away on it.
 AN EAST-SIDE RAMBLE.
The New Yorkers, following the custom of Europe, often fence
themselves about with a great deal of ceremony in social matters,
even such small social matters as making calls.
Some ladies have days when they receive calls; others have no
specified day, and then you take your chance of being turned from
the door without seeing them, or if you find them, of finding them
reluctant and preoccupied. A friend of mine says he has often felt as
if he had been admitted through the error of the man or the maid
who opened the door to him at such houses, and who returned,
after carrying up his name, to say, with a frightened air, that the lady
would be down in a moment.
But when there are days there is never any misgiving about letting
you in. The door is whisked open before you have had time to ring,
sometimes by a servant who has the effect of not belonging to the
house, but hired for the afternoon. Then you leave your card on a
platter of some sort in the hall to attest the fact of your visit, and at
the simpler houses find your way into the drawing-room
unannounced, though the English custom of shouting your name
before you is very common and is always observed where there is
any pretense to fashion. Certain ladies receive once a week
throughout the season; others receive on some day each week of
December or January or February, as the case may be. When there
is this limit to a month, the reception insensibly takes on the
character of an afternoon tea, and, in fact, it varies from that only in
being a little less crowded. There is tea or chocolate or mild punch
and a table spread with pastries and sweets, which hardly any one
touches. A young lady dedicates herself to the service of each urn
and offers you the beverage that flows from it. There is a great air of
gayety, a very excited chatter of female voices, a constant flutter of