Historical reported dream · English · original published report
The doctors who could not make me sleep
Anonymous historical child writer
Children’s Dreams (1920) · Printed pp. 87–88
Dreamer identified by the source: Anonymous girl, 13
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I dreamt that I was ill and had several doctors in attendance. The doctors said that I was dying and could not live more than a few hours, while I felt that I was rapidly recovering. This I told the doctors, and no sooner had I said it than they began to do all manner of things to make me die sooner. They were very funny ways of killing people ; one was this — one of the doctors put a doctor's thermometer in my mouth and began to heat the mercury in the bulb saying that as the mercury rose up the thermometer I should feel as if I was having gas administered to me at the dentists and gradually get more drowsy and yet more drowsy until I should drop off to sleep and never wake again. But this did not succeed, for instead of getting drowsy I felt more awake than was usual. Then the doctor told mother to throw the window right up because fresh air would kill anyone, and mother was actually so hard-hearted as to do it. But, of course, this did not kill but only revived me. Then the doctors all lost their tempers and said that they did not care whether I lived or died and left me alone. Then I began to get well quickly, but mother felt sure that I was dying and insisted on my saying farewell to everyone in the house, and just as I was saying good-bye to my baby brother I awoke — screaming with fright.
Source & context
All thermometer/fresh-air assertions are impossible dream actions, not medical advice. No waking diagnosis is inferred or added. Published historical reported dream: the compiler acknowledges secondary elaboration and fusion with waking material; this is not an independently authenticated untouched manuscript.
Anonymous child writer’s reported dream (Anonymous girl, 13), in C. W. Kimmins (compiler), Children’s Dreams (London/New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1920), Printed pp. 87–88. Original English University of Toronto/Robarts copy via Internet Archive. Editorial title and navigation metadata added by Synastry; original source wording, uncertainty and paragraph/section divisions retained after scan-confirmed OCR repairs. Historical published report, not a modern Synastry community submission.
No exact dream date inferred from last night/Friday/Sunday. Sourcep18 says most main-school reports collected November–December1918; industrial-school reports March–April1919; deaf/blind-school reports June1919. Collection period is not necessarily dream date.
Public domain in the United States (original 1920 English edition) ↗
Original English reported dreams printed in Children’s Dreams (Longmans, Green and Co., 1920), compiled by C. W. Kimmins. The original 1920 published text has an expired-US-publication basis, corroborated by the archive’s US status metadata. The individual child writers are unnamed; the compiler is not represented as each dream’s author or dreamer, and his lifetime is not substituted for anonymous authorship terms. No modern translation or new edition is copied. Public archive access is not a new licence; no blanket worldwide rights warranty is asserted.
Source locator and text provenance
Printed pp. 87–88
The original text and redactions are preserved. The page title is an editorial navigation label.
Source-scan-confirmed OCR letters/punctuation corrected; physical page/line furniture and word-division hyphens normalized as documented by the exact reversible ledger. Original paragraph/section divisions restored. Source spelling, child grammar, uncertainty and dream-to-waking transitions retained. No generated scene, ending or modern translation inserted into the narrative.
- Account text SHA-256
- 7f55966f12a318d1ec62dc54864f1a609e2825643b8a2323d2f6f0cf2569be81
- Source file SHA-256
- c6225de3a7f8f20c8bef1805f8c6b853f047798e611adfb552ef37c216d3808e
Content notes
- Medical nightmare
- Death threat
Connections in the Loom
Titles, theme labels, illustrations and map connections are editorial navigation aids. They are separate from the account’s words and do not establish connections between real people.