FEAR IN CHILDREN. DREAMS

I

The one who brings up a child represents its brain. Every ugly thing told to the child, every shock, every fright given him, will remain like minute splinters in the flesh, to torture him all his life long.

An old soldier, whom I asked what his greatest fears had been, answered me thus: 'I have only had one, but it pursues me still. I am nearly seventy years old, I have looked death in the face I do not know how many times, I have never lost heart in any danger, but when I pass a little old church in the shades of the forest, or a deserted chapel in the mountains, I always remember a neglected oratory in my native village, and I shiver and look around, as though seeking the corpse of a murdered man which I once saw carried into it when a child, and with which an old servant wanted to shut me up to make me good.’

Anxiety, fear, horror will twine themselves perpetually around the memory, like deadly ivy choking the light of reason. At every step we remember the terrors of childhood: the vaults of a cellar, the dark arch of a bridge, the cross-roads losing themselves in the darkness, the crosses hidden amidst the bushes of a cemetery, a dim light flickering far away in the darkness of night, a lonely cave washed by the waves of the sea, the ruins of an uninhabited castle, the mysterious silence of a deserted tower, breathe out the memory of childish fear. The eye of the child seems to cast one more look on these scenes from out of the very depths of the soul.

Not only the mother, the nurse, the maid, or the servants, but hundreds of generations have worked to denaturalise the brains of children with the same barbarity as those wild tribes who distort the heads of their children by pressure, deforming what they think to beautify.

The children of ancient Greece and Rome used to be frightened with the lamias who would suck their blood, with the masks of the atellans, the Cyclops, or with a black Mercury who would come to carry them away.

And this most pernicious error in education has not yet disappeared, for children are still frightened with the bogey-man, with stories of imaginary monsters, the ogre, the hobgoblin, the wizard, and the witches.

Every now and then children are told: 'This will peck at you,’ 'That will bite you,’ 'Now I’ll call the dog,’ 'There’s the sweep coming,’ and a hundred other terrors which make the tears well up and spoil their disposition, making their life a burden by incessantly agitating them with threats, with tortures, which will make them timid and shrinking for the rest of their life.

The imagination of children is far more vivid and excitable than in adults. When a child is naturally timorous, it is better not to leave it in the dark, but to keep a night-light burning in the room, so that, on waking, it may at once recognise the place, and its fancies may not assume an air of reality. The child’s eye is much more apt than ours to trace pursuing spectres in the outlines of accustomed objects. The stories told them in the evening, any exciting emotions towards night-time, are most certainly reproduced in their dreams.

A turkey-cock, ten days old, that had never heard the cry of the falcon, disappeared with the rapidity of lightning when it heard the cry the first time, hiding itself in a corner, where it cowered motionless and silent for more than ten minutes.

Spalding took a brood of chickens, a week old, and while they were chirping around the hen in the meadow, he let fly a falcon. At once the chickens tried to hide in the grass and bushes, and the hen, that had always been kept shut up, so that she might have no experience of enemies, precipitated herself with such violence on the falcon on seeing it that she would certainly have killed it. Now neither she nor her first brood had ever seen a bird of prey. Spalding, in order to assure himself that it really is instinct which causes the recognition of enemies, had already let some pigeons fly, and these settled near the hen without producing any disturbance or emotion, as in the case of the falcon. We must therefore admit that there is an innate recollection which constitutes fear.

II

Philosophers, always dominated by a sublime idea of human faculties, have too much neglected the study of savages and children. And yet it is here that we ought to begin, if it is true that one must proceed from the simple to the complex. Physiologists seem, more than others, to have recognised this necessity, in order to distinguish inherited psychic facts from those which we are capable of acquiring by the experience of the senses. Let the physiologist remain long days at home with a sympathetic wife and a darling child, attentively observing and writing the whole life of the latter; this is for him the best, the ideal study.

My colleague, Prof. Preyer, one of the most distinguished of embryologists, had this happy thought, and his book on the 'Soul of the Child’[29] is one of the most interesting volumes of modern psychology.

Even the first day after birth the face of the child changes suddenly if it is held towards the light from the window, or if its eyes are shaded by a hand.

On the second day it shuts its eyes forcibly and immediately when a lighted candle is brought near to it, and draws its head back energetically if a light is held before its eyes on waking.

In this case the child responds through excessive sensitiveness, not through fear. A child, a few months old, looking at the clouds or a snow-covered surface, closes its eyes oftener and more forcibly than an adult.

During the first month children do not wink at a sudden noise, or when one makes a pretence of putting a finger into their eye.

In Prof. Preyer’s child this movement appeared for the first time on the fifty-seventh day, and only from the sixtieth did it become regular and constant. We cannot think that a child, nine weeks old, can have any conception of danger, and that it closes its eyes and lifts its hands from fear. It was certainly not the result of experience, as we know that there had been no opportunity for it to learn the injurious nature of many things.

Instead of entertaining the notion of fear, it seems more logical to consider these facts as analogous to the shutting of the eyes during the first hours of life.

The sudden shadow or sound constitutes a disagreeable fact, and the disturbed nervous system responds by a reflex movement, just as many children cry when they hear the first clap of thunder, although they do not know what it is, and start when they suddenly hear a door bang or some object fall.

Preyer noticed that in the seventh week his child started and lifted its hands at any sudden noise without waking.

An expression of the greatest wonder can be produced in a child of seven months old by opening and shutting a fan before it; but the wide-open eye and mouth and the fixed look are not merely signs of astonishment, for when one draws the infant away from the breast, it expresses its lively desire to be fed again by the same attitude.

In these cases the eyes shine with a more abundant secretion of tears. Wide-open eyes accompany the first smile. One notices that children have a tendency to open their eyes in joy and close them in displeasure.

Children, like the insane and like animals, when they have had some disagreeable experience, are frightened at everything which they do not know. Sometimes fear appears suddenly; from one day to another a child may become timid and frightened when it sees an unknown person, or if the father or mother makes some unusual gesture, or calls loudly.

The fear which children have of dogs and cats, before they have learnt why they are to be feared, is a consequence of heredity; even later, when they have gained some experience, they are overcome with fear at the sight of sucking pups or kittens, which would be ridiculous if it were not an innate aversion. The same may be said of the fear of falling when they make the first steps, although they have never yet fallen, and of the fear which children have at the first sight of the sea.

III

Pavor nocturnus is a malady peculiar to children from the third to the seventh year, and must not be confounded with nightmare.

The symptoms are the following: Sudden awaking of the child after a few hours of profound sleep.—A vivid expression of great terror, the eyes fixed on some point, as though on some apparition standing before them.—Failure of consciousness: the child recognises no one, and does not reply to questions.—Skin bathed in perspiration.—Stronger cardiac pulsations.—Rapid pulse.—Laboured breath.—Trembling of the limbs.—Temperature normal.

The intensity, duration, and frequency of these attacks vary greatly; they last generally from five to twenty minutes, after which the children recover consciousness and fall asleep.

In the morning they remember nothing. Rarely do the attacks occur several times in the same night; they appear as a rule at intervals of a few days, often disappearing altogether after occurring two or three times.

The causes of this malady are hereditary or accidental. Pale, delicate, thin, scrofulous, anÆmic, very intelligent or irritable children are easily attacked; predisposed to it also are children of excitable parents, or of those troubled with nervous affections. Amongst occasional causes of the pavor nocturnus may be specially mentioned strong emotions, fever, and diseases of the digestive organs. In general the children recover; the prognosis, as we say, is favourable.

Some retain their excessive nervous excitability, are subject to palpitation of the heart, but only in very exceptional conditions have the attacks of pavor nocturnus exercised a lastingly injurious influence.

IV

The dreams of children are more real, vivid, fearful than of adults, because their brain is excessively impressionable, as is shown by the fact that things seen in childhood are indelibly impressed on the memory, and because their life is made up of emotions, while their weakness renders them more timorous, exaggerates every danger, and makes every enemy appear disproportionately superior to them in strength.

Emotions and fright may become so great in dreams that some children have had actual epileptic fits in consequence, as has recently been proved by Prof. Nothnagel.

In adults dreams seem sometimes so vividly real, that they resemble delirious paroxysms. What terrible events have taken place, what catastrophes at which we shudder, recognising the fragility of the human mind and the awful power of dreams!

I quote a single case which took place in Glasgow in 1878.

A man, twenty-four years old, of the name of Fraser, rose suddenly during the night, took his child and hurled it against the wall, shattering its skull. The screams of his wife awakened him, when, to his horror, he found that he had killed his son whom he had thought to save from a wild animal which he had seen enter the room and spring on to the child’s bed to devour it. Fraser gave himself up to justice at once and was set at liberty, because it was evident that he had acted unconsciously.

He was a workman, pale, of a nervous temperament, sluggish intellect, and rather childish, but industrious at his work. His mother had suffered all her life from epileptic attacks, eventually dying in a fit of this kind. His father, too, was epileptic. His maternal aunt and her children were insane; his sister died, as a child, in convulsions. From his infancy he had been the victim of terrifying dreams, in which he used to spring, screaming, out of bed. These dreams troubled him especially when he had suffered any emotion during the day. He had once saved his little sister from falling into the water, and this had made such an impression on him that he often rose during the night, called loudly to his sister, and clasped her in his arms as though to keep her from falling. Sometimes he would awake, sometimes go back to bed, still sleeping, and in the morning would feel depressed without remembering anything. After his marriage in 1875 the attacks assumed a different character.

He was pursued by terrible dreams, and used to spring out of bed screaming 'Fire!’ or that his son was in convulsions, or that a wild animal had got into the room, which he would then try to find and hit with anything which fell into his hands. Several times he had seized his wife, his father, and a friend who lived with him, by the throat, nearly strangling them in the belief that he had caught the wild animal. In these attacks his eyes were wide-open and full of expression, and he saw all objects, although he was blind to everything which did not agree with his mental illusions. It was in one of these attacks that he killed his son.

And he was an affectionate father! The mind shudders at the thought of his unspeakable grief when consciousness returned.