students of psychology say that the principal stuff of dreams seems to be furnished by the early experience of life; and when they are dealing with mental ailments, they say that delusions and obsessions are often explained by the study of the dreams of diseased brains, which point as a rule either to some unfulfilled desire, or to some severe nervous shock sustained in childhood.  But I cannot discern any predominant cause of my own elaborate visions; the only physical cause which seems to me to be very active in producing dreams is if I am either too hot or too cold in bed.  A sudden change of temperature in the night is the one thing which seems to me quite certain to produce a great crop of dreams.

Another very curious fact about my dreams is that I am wholly deserted by any moral sense.  I have stolen interesting objects, I have even killed people in dreams, without adequate cause; but I am then entirely devoid of remorse, and only anxious to escape detection.  I have never felt anything of the nature of shame or regret in a dream.  I find myself anxious indeed, but fertile in expedients for escaping unscathed.  On the other hand, certain emotions are very active in dreams.  I sometimes appear to go with a brother or sister through the rooms or gardens of a house, which on awaking proves to be wholly imaginary, and recall with my companion all sorts of pathetic and delightful incidents of childhood which seem to have taken place there.

Again, though much of my life is given to writing, I hardly ever find myself composing anything in a dream.  Once I wrote a poem in my sleep, a curious Elizabethan lyric, which may be found in the Oxford Book of Verse, called “The Phoenix.”  It is not the sort of thing that I have ever written before or since.  It came to me on the night before my birthday, in 1891, I think, when I was staying with a friend at the Dun Bull Hotel, by Hawes Water in Westmorland.  I scribbled the lyric down on awaking.  I afterwards added a verse, thinking the poem incomplete.  I published it in a book of poems, and showed the proof to a friend, who said to me, pointing to the added stanza:  “Ah, you must omit that stanza—­it is quite out of keeping with the rest of the poem!”

But this is a quite unique experience, except that I once dreamed I was present at a confirmation service, at which a very singular hymn was sung, which I recollected on waking, and which is far too grotesque to write down, being addressed, as it was, to the bishop who was to perform the rite.  At the time, however, it seemed to me both moving and appropriate.

It is often said that dreams only take place either when one is just going to sleep or beginning to awake.  But that is not my experience.  I have occasionally been awakened suddenly by some loud sound, and on those occasions I have come out of dreams of an intensity and vividness that I have never known equalled.  Neither is it true in my experience that dreamful sleep is unrefreshing.  I should say it was rather the other way.  Profound and heavy sleep is generally to me a sign that I am not very well; but a sleep full of happy and interesting dreams is generally succeeded by a feeling of freshness and gaiety, as if one had been both rested and well entertained.