hearing certain sounds soon after his blindness, and claims that he
is thus able to keep alive his notions of color. To him an alto voice
is gray; a soprano, white; a tenor, yellow; a bass, black. My own
voice suggested a dark background. A few words are also colored to
him; the sound of _Smith_ seems yellow. These analogies, however, are
fanciful and rare. They belong to a region of mental phenomena, of
great complexity, in which associations and idiosyncracies have free
play, and seem as little capable of definite explanation as much of
the stuff that dreams are made of.
A brief selection of instances from the collection of dreams and
parts of dreams which these blind people have put at my command,
may serve to reinforce the several factors of the dream-life of the
blind which have been commented upon. Many of the dreams present
no special differentiation from those of the seeing, but the most
carefully recorded ones usually reveal some traces of a defective or
peculiar apperception. A blind boy with more than usual imagination
dreamed that he was in a battle in which Alexander the Great put
the Gauls to flight; he heard the thunder of the cannon, but saw no
flash. A young man dreamed that his mother was dead; this he knew
by the cold touch of her body. He next heard the chanting of the
Mass at her funeral. This young man at times improvises airs in his
dreams. A partially-sighted girl dreams repeatedly of a wide river,
and is afraid of being dashed across it, while anxious to secure the
flowers on the opposite bank, which she dimly sees. A boy dreamed of
being picked up by some mysterious agency, and then suddenly allowed
to fall from a tremendous height. Here he awoke, and found his head
at the foot of the bed. Another dreamed of the Judgment Day, mainly
in terms of hearing. He was drawn to heaven by a rope, clinging to
a pole used for exercising; he heard the trumpets sounding, and the
voices singing, and so on. One dreamed that he was on a steamboat
which suddenly sank, whereupon he quietly walked ashore. Another,
that his father saw some wild people in the water, and swam out and
rescued them; another, of a large conflagration, of which he saw
nothing, but was constantly receiving reports from the bystanders.
A girl dreamed that she was sent by her aunt to get a loaf of bread
from the cellar, and was cautioned not to step too far down in the
cellar, because there was water there; upon arriving at the dangerous
place she stood still, and called for her aunt. Another dreamed of
chivalry, as the result of reading "Ivanhoe;" another of visiting
Lincoln and being much impressed with the strangeness of the place;
another of her examination in physics--she placed a piece of glass
on her finger, and showed its centre of gravity, when the glass fell
and broke with a crash; on another occasion she dreamed that she was
sick, went to the doctor, and recovered her full sight, and things
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