WHAT DREAMS MAY COME.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1212, 24 May 1895, Page 16

WHAT DREAMS MAY COME.

. 11l a receiit le'cture at the Royal institution, Dr B. W. Richardson Says that thb sleep of health is dreamless. ‘'Dreams,” | says Shakespeare, “ are children of an idle brain. If both the doctor and the poet are rig-ht it follows that idle brains are unhealthy brains. Ho doubt there might be truth in the inference, but that is not quite the point. Are all dreams signs of a diseased condition? To this the doctor says “ Ho." He divides dreams into two classes ; those started by noises or other causes outside the sleeper, and those produced by pain, fever or indigestion. Here we inject a fact. We receive multitudes of letters containing this affirmation, almost in identical words: “ I was worse tired in the morning than when I went to bed. 'Io this the doctor has an answer. He says, “ When we feel wearied in the morning very likely it results from dreams that we have forgotten.” Quite so.

Di other words there is a bodily condition which may prevent a person from working by day at his usual calling, but obliges him to labour all night under a mental stimulus of which he knows nothing save by its resulting exhaustion. These unhappy wretches toil harder, therefore, for no compensation, when they are ill, than they have to do to earn a living when they are well: What an infernal and frightful fact ! And this too | without taking into account their physical suffering at all times. “Night/’ said Coleridge, “ is my hell." From one of the letters referred to we quote what a woman says of her daughter : “ She was worse tired in a morning than when she went to bed.” Poor girl ! Those “ forgotten dreams ” had tossed her about as a ship is tossed in a tempest. Night was her day of labour. 23 The mother’s simple tale is this : “In June, 1890, my daughter Ann Elizabeth became low, weak and fretful, and complained of pain in the chest after eatjno\ Next her stomach was so irritable that she vomited all the fopd took. it lyas awful to see hep heaye qua strain. For three weeks nothing passed through her stomach, except a little soda water and lime Water. Later on, her feet and legs began to swell and puff from dropsy. She was now pale as death and looked as though she had not a drop of blood in her body, and was always cold. Month after month dragged by and she got weaker every day. She could not walk without support for she had lost the proper use ofher fegs/and her body swayed from side to side as she moved-

“4 doctor attended hep for twelve months, and finally said it was no use giving any mere medicine, as it would do no good. In May, ISQI, I'took her to the Dewsbury Infirmary. She got no better there, apd I thought I was surely goipg fq lose her. She wps then thirteen years of ago. “One day a lady (Mrs Lightqller) called at my shop, 'and seeing how bad my daughter was, spoke qf a medicine called Mother Sergei’s Curative Syrup, and persuaded ps tp, try it. J got a bottle from the Thornhill L.ees Co - operatiye Stopes, and she began taking it. In two days she found a litfle relief - the sickness was not so frequept. She kept on with the Syrup apd ‘steadily imppoyed, Sjoqp She was strong - as and has sjpce beep ill the h.est of health, apd cap take any kind of food, After she had taken the Syrup only two weeks the neighbours wero surprised at her improved appearance, and I told them what had

brought it about—that Seigel’s Syrup had done what the doctors could not do, it saved her life. Yours truly (Signed), (Mrs) Sabah Ann S heard, 19, .Brewery lane, Thornhill Lees, near Dewsbury, October 11 th, 1892.” The inciting cause of this young girl’s pitiful suffering was indigestion and dyspepsia, dropsy being one of its most dangerous symptoms. It attacks both youth and age, its fearful and often fatal results being due to the fact that physicians usually treat the symptoms instead of the disease itself. “A child’s dreams,” says l)r Rich arisen, “ are signs of disturbed Wealthy ahd should be 'regarded, with 'anxiety.”/’ T’ffe same'is true 1 of the ffrehms of <ffder people.'’ They fneffn poisbn ‘in the stomach; hud point tb the ‘ ’immediate' ‘ Mother S.eigEl’s Curative ! S^:f Up','