One does not read very far in Lamb without coming upon a mention of dreams.

They creep into

his figures of speech and provide matter for his allusion. Four of the Essays of Elia are on The
subject of dreams. “Witches and Other Night Fears” describes childhood dreams and discusses
the difference between the dreams of children and those of adults. Two other essays-“Dream-
Children: A Reverie” and “The Child Angel: A Dream”-are real or fictitious Dreams of the
author. The treatment of The popular fallacy, “That We Should Rise with the Lark,” is based
upon the significance of dreams.
This preoccupation with dreams is related to several of Lamb’s most fundamental interests and
traits. It is associated, in the first place, with his interest in children and childhood. In “Witches
and Other Night Fears” it is the child whose night visions are the most disturbing and alarming
and the adult whose dreams have become distressingly pale. It Is natural for one who loves
children, who delights in their fancies and air castles and the stirrings within them that die with
maturity- it is natural for a writer of this bent to cultivate a lively interest in dreams. Lamb agrees
with Wordsworth and other romanticists that childhood is a divine period that much of the
splendor of the spirit passes away in the full-grown man.

In the second place, it is fairly clear that Lamb was a constant dreamer and that as a child he was
often disturbed and frightened by dreams. “I was dreadfully alive [as a child] to nervous terrors.
The night time, solitude, and the dark, were my hell….. I never laid my head on my pillow, I
suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life-so far as memory serves in
things so long ago without an assurance, which realized its own prophecy, of seeing some
frightful spectre.”

That Lamb suffered from this sort of experience is confirmed elsewhere by the writer himself
and by Lucas, his biographer. It is reasonable to assume that this element in his life is somehow
related to Lamb's inherited and incipient insanity. Concerning his insanity and concerning the
relationship of dreams to insanity, we know too little to reach definite conclusions. The mental
illness in Lamb and his family encouraged his vein of melancholy, his concern with the
mysteries of the human fancy, and the fascination which the dream life held for him.
Incidentally, his youthful preoccupation with the morbid was hardly discouraged by the presence
in his home of such books as Joseph Glanville’s Philosophical Considerations Touching Witches
and Witchcraft, which, according to his own account, he pored over and which distressed him in
his dreams.

But that Lamb’s dreams were not all unpleasant, at least as he grew up, is fairly obvious from his
descriptions of them and the pleasant account he leaves of his dream life. In the morning, he
says, while other men are busy in the workaday world, “We choose to linger a bed and digest our
dreams. It is the very time to recombine the wandering images, which night in a confused mass
presented; to snatch them from forgetfulness; to shape and mould them.”

His taste for dreams Is like his taste for food; he is a gourmet in both: “Some people have no
good of their dreams. Like fast feeders, they gulp them too grossly, to taste them curiously. We
love to chew the cud of a foregone vision; to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or
act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies.” Lamb complained that his
dream lost their flavor with the years: “The poverty of my dreams mortifies me. There is
Coleridge, at his will can conjure up Icy domes, pleasure-houses for Kubla Khan, And
Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abara….When I cannot muster a fiddle.”

In a passage which Lamb deleted from “Witches and Other Night Fears” he says more of the
relationship of genius to dreams and applies the problem to himself. After describing a dream of
his, he goes on to say: “When I awoke I came to a determination to write prose all the rest of my
life; and with sub- mission to some of our young writers, who are yet diffident of their powers,
and balancing per- haps between verse and prose, they might not do unwisely to decide the
preference by the texture of their natural dreams. If these are prosaic, they may depend upon it
they have not much to expect in a creative way from their artificial ones. What dreams must not
Spenser have had!”

Probably the most popular present day theory of dreams is the contribution of Freud: the dream
portrays the fulfilment of some desire which has been frustrated in the dreamer’s waking life.
“An idea merely existing in the region of possibility is replaced [in dreams] by a vision of its
accomplishment.” In this sort of thinking, typical of the contemporary scientific approach, there
is no place for the illusory air castles of the whimsical Lamb, whose suggestions are echoes of
ancient belief, the biblical tradition, and occultism, rather than of modern thought. In “That We
Should Rise with the Lark,” as we have seen, Lamb links those of his dreams which foreshadow
a future state with his desire to be rid of this world and to die. To explain this sort of
phenomenon, Freud has suggested the presence in people of “an impulse of self-destruction,”
which is “the manifestation of a death instinct, which can never be absent in any vital process
and which is apt to motivate dreams.