WHAT DREAMS MAT COME.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXV, Issue 4253, 29 June 1895, Page 4

WHAT DREAMS MAT COME.

In a recent leoture at the Royal In3titution, Dr. B. W. Richardson says thafr, the sleep of health is dreamless. •"Dreams," saya Shakespeare, "are Children of an idle, brain." If both the jdoctor and the poet are right it follows that idle, brains are unhealthy brains. (No dbtibfe 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 " No." He divides dreams into two classes ; those started Hy noises or other causes Outside the sleeper, and those produced jby pain, fever, or indigestion. Here we inject a fact. We receive multitudes of letters containing this affirmation, almost; in identical words : i 1 was worse tired in the mornvfoj than when I went to bed" To this'the doctor has an answer. He says, When wef eel wearied in the morning very likely it results from dreams that we have forgotten. Quite so. [n 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 wretohes 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 hed." Poor girl. Those "forgotten dreams" had tossed her about as a ship is tossed in a tempest. Night was her day of labour. 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 eating. Next her stomach was so irritable that she vomited all the food she took. It was Awf ul to see her heave and strain. For three weeks nothing passed 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. Mouth after month dragged by and she got weaker every j day. She could not walk without sup-* j port, for she had lost the proper use of her legs, and her body swayed from side to side as she moved, "A doctor attended her for twelve months, and finally said it was no use giving her any more medicine as it would do no good. In May, 1891, I took her to the Dewsbury Infirmary. She got no better there, and I thought I was surely going to lose her. She was then thirteen years of age. "One day a lady (Mrs Lightoller) called at my shop, and seeing how bad my daughter was, spoke of a medicine called Mother Seigel's Curative Syrup, and persuaded us to try it. I got a bottle from the Thoruhill Leeds Cooperative Stores, and she began taking it. In two days she found a little relief ; the sickness was not so frequent. She kept on with the Syrup and steadily improved Soon she was as strong as ever and has since been in the best of health and can take any kind of food. After she had taken the Syrup only two weeks the neighbours were 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) Sarah Ann Sheakd, 19, Brewery Lane, Thornhill Lees, near Dewsbury, October 11th, 1892." The inciting cause of all 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 itsel£ " A child's dreams," says Dr Richardson, " are signs of disturbed health and should be regarded with anxiety." The same is true of the dreams of older people. They mean poison in the stomach and point to the immediate use of Mother Seigel's Curative Syrup.