ILLNESS dream meaning

I have always tried to remember the dreams I have had in the delirium of fever and illness, and in many of these dreams there has figured the same woman — clad in black, with long, flowing, black hair, and wild animal eyes — eyes that might have be-longed to a woman of the stone age. Thrice, before the deaths of those I have loved, I have dreamed that this same woman has glided up to my bedside and bitten and pinched me. And on each occasion I have awakened with the sting of her sharp, cruel teeth, and her hard, bony fingers burning into my flesh. Can she, I ask myself, be the banshee? But to revert to my deliriums, the deliriums of my youth, in chicken-pox, and measles, and of my later days, in rheumatic fever, dysentery, and severe colds. Apart from this woman in black, who has stood, crouched, sat, or lain at the foot of my bed with greedy expectation in her eyes, I have seen countless other forms and faces; human faces on animal bodies, and vice versa; countenances all awry, and convulsed alternately with anger and merriment; hotchpotches of clothes and limbs mixed anyhow; and yet — yet, despite the apparent chaos, after long and earnest thought I have come to the conclusion that all, all may contain some subtle, hidden meaning. Each contortion of the face, each monstrous feature, each action, gesture, and colour may, and in all probability does, contain its own peculiar significance; interpretative, had I but the key, to the language of the past, the future — and the secrets of the occult world.The same observation applies to the dreams of the opium smoker — the dreams wherein he travels through scenes of surpassing beauty and strangeness — scenes which rise up before him with extraordinary reality and vividness. And each tableau has its meaning — nay, not merely each tableau, but each item in each tableau — from the quivering of a leaf to the hue of the sky and trees; and trees, flowers, grass, rocks and pebbles, even the glistening of the water, the whispering of the wind, the odours in the atmosphere — all, all contain a whole world of suggestion — of significance. And, yet again, in the fancies of delirium tremens, those wild, frightful fancies of snakes, and rats, and devils, that surround the wretched drunkard on all sides, and twist, and turn, and twirl — some red, some black, some blue — in these too, there may be meaning — each animal, each colour, each gyration each convolution may have its individual purport. Amid the most extravagant confusion there may yet be some slender thread of connection.