INTRODUCTION

Antoine Lavalette was a crony of Napoleon. When Nappy was finally ousted in 1815, Lavalette was imprisoned and scheduled for execution. He dreamt this in prison; he survived to tell it because of his wife. She visited, they swapped clothes, and he slipped out in her guise--and fled the country. The new regime held her for months, but eventually let her go.

--Chris Wayan

FLAYED COLUMN

One night, while I was asleep, the clock of the Palais de Justice struck twelve and awoke me. I heard the gate open to relieve the sentry, but I fell asleep again immediately.

In this sleep I dreamt that I was standing in the Rue St. Honore. A melancholy darkness spread around me; all was still; nevertheless, a slow and uncertain sound soon arose.

All of a sudden, I perceived at the bottom of the street and advancing toward me, a troop of cavalry--the men and horses, however, all flayed. The men held torches in their hands, the red flames of which illuminated faces without skin, and bloody muscles. Their hollow eyes rolled fearfully in their sockets, their mouths opened from ear to ear, and helmets of hanging flesh covered their hideous heads. The horses dragged along their own skins in the kennels which overflowed with blood on all sides.

Pale and disheveled women appeared and disappeared at the windows in dismal silence; low inarticulate groans filled the air, and I remained in the street alone petrified with horror, and deprived of strength sufficient to seek my safety in flight. This horrible troop continued passing along rapidly in a gallop, and casting frightful looks upon me.

Their march continued, I thought, for five hours, and they were followed by an immense number of artillery wagons full of bleeding corpses, whose limbs still quivered; a disgusting smell of blood and bitumen almost choked me.

The next day the turnkey confirmed my calculations. I, nevertheless, do not remember one single event in my life the duration of which I have been able more exactly to calculate, of which the details are deeper engraven on my memory, and of which I preserve a more perfect consciousness.

TWO NOTES

Lavalette is sure his dream was nearly instantaneous--subjective hours pass in no more than a few minutes. Dreams like this and Alfred Maury's Guillotine convinced 19th Century researchers that dreams were instantaneous. Yet modern REM experiments find dreams normally happen in realtime. In Maury's case the conflict can only be resolved by assuming he sensed his headboard would fall on his neck that night. Weird, but if you postulate ESP, or Dunne's theory of time, reconciling Maury's dream with the REM evidence is just possible.

But here it isn't--both the start AND the end of the dream are constrained. My guess is that the speed-up that happens in a life-threatening emergency can happen in dreams too--and did here. Why not? His life was threatened. He expected to die.

My source, Dr William Hammond (1869), seems to miss Lavalette's point that dreams can compress time. He sees just one thing: the dreaming mind's an idiot! The flayed column can't be metaphor, or hyperbole, or just dramatic compression--all the horrors of the Napoleonic wars marching toward a man complicit in those wars (Lavalette, I think, takes this for granted). No, dreams are just silly:

No instance can more strikingly exemplify aberration of the faculty of judgment than the above. There was no astonishment felt with the horror experienced, but all the impossible events which appeared to be transpiring were accepted as facts, which might have taken place in the regular order of nature.

Aberrant judgment? He faced execution for his part in those deaths! Hammond's tone-deaf literalism (and he's a typical pre-Freudian; read Hervey de St-Denys on the dream Her Dead Brother) almost makes me sympathize with Freud, up against dunderheads like this.

Almost.

SOURCE: Sleep and its Derangements by Dr William A. Hammond, 1869, part IV, circa p.80; his source was: Dream Thought and Dream Life. Medical Critic and Psychological Journal, No. vi., April, 1862, p. 199. "It appeared originally in a biographical sketch of Lavalette, published in the Revue de Paris".

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