World Dream Bank: The Death Chanty

World Dream Bank home - add a dream - newest - art gallery - sampler - dreams by title, subject, author, date, places, names

The Death Chanty

Dreamed 1914/9/21 by a friend of E.M. Martin

Source: Dreams in War-Time by E.M. Martin (1915)

I have had a letter from a woman who is, too, a dreamer of dreams, and what she has told me, I will give in her own words.

I dreamed I was in the parlour of an old Inn, whose bowed windows looked down a narrow cobbled street with a patch of blue sea showing at the bottom; it might have been an old bit of Gravesend if I had not known that this patch of water was the sea. A woman was busy laying the table for some meal, and I was by turns idly watching her and as idly looking out of the window, when I heard the sound of singing; at first soft and far away, but growing louder every moment. And then I could hear the music and the words, and see sailors coming up the street, marching as they march for a naval funeral, only there was no gun-carriage, no coffin, nothing but the empty cobbled way, and on either side, close to the houses, the sad procession singing this sorrowful chanty:--
God bless our Army,
God bless our Navy,
And God bless our Allies true;
And bring 'em home
Wherever they may roam,
And our poor drowned sailors too.
Over and over the last line rolled out to a tune as haunting and as sad as the song of the Volga boatmen, and as the procession (always keeping the space of cobbled way clear between them as though the coffin were there on its gun-carriage) wound up the steep little street leaving the sea behind them, I turned and asked the woman, "What is it? Why do they march like that singing this song?"
"It's the sailors' chanty for the widows and orphans--they always sing it."
"But why do they sing it now?"
As if for answer, one of the sailors turned and looked at me through the window while still singing the last line of the chanty
And our poor drowned sailors too.
His face was pale, and sad as the face of a dead man, and I tried to read the ship's name on his cap, but could not, and woke up weeping.
That same day came the news of the sinking of the Hogue, the Cressy and the Aboukir.

My friend, who is herself a maker of songs, has sung to me the chanty these dead sailors sung to her in her dream, and, to my thinking, it is even sadder than the song of the Volga boatmen, and to the full, as sweet. We have spoken much of her dream, and she tells me, this friend of mine, that she knows the singing sailors were the drowned men themselves, pacing a familiar street, looking through the window of a friendly Inn parlour where they had once been welcome guests, and trying to bring to the living some sense of their duty to the dead. Well, maybe she is right, for she is one of those who have the gift of foreknowledge, and whose birthright is the sea.

--E.M. Martin

EDITOR'S NOTES

This dream is more political than it seems. The Hogue, Cressy and Aboukir were three cruisers sunk by a single U-boat in scarcely an hour. Over 1400 men died, mostly inexperienced reservists; a worse disaster, proportional to Britain's population at the time, than Pearl Harbor or 9/11. It soon came out that their officers had assumed submarines were no threat in the area, so all three ships were cruising slowly, were not zigzagging, and had no destroyers flanking them, despite safety rules. These were far more tightly enforced as a result--a bit too late, of course.
As a songwriter myself, I wish we had the music for the song of the dead sailors. Lost with the dreamer's name, I suppose.
Martin's book is not a study of British dreams about the war but a journal of his own dreams, with just one exception: this. He was reputable, clearly knew and trusted his friend--and her dream is controversial enough to make her reticence understandable. So I see no reason to doubt the dream's content and timing are real. This not a case comparable to most anonymous accounts of the period.
Skeptics can, however, dismiss the apparent prediction as coincidence if they like. It's hard enough to assess the frequency of such dreams; harder yet to evaluate the frequency of disasters so bad they cause political scandals. I would ask skeptics to answer this honestly, though: have you ever waked in tears over a mass drowning?
Those who've read a few hundred examples of apparent psychic dreams on this site will notice one unusual aspect here--the dreamer has no loved ones among the dead. Her concern is not personal but tribal; she functions more like a shaman than a dreamer as conceived by Freud, Ellis, or even Jung. Nearly all this era's dream-theories saw dreams as purely personal. And nearly all this era's dream-theories were wrong--at least about some dreamers of unusual sensitivity. Emotional or otherwise.

--Chris Wayan

LISTS AND LINKS: sea dreams - music - grief and tears - politics - the dead march in more open protest, in: Dead Rights - war - crashes and sinkings - the dead - psychic dreams - E.M. Martin's own dreams - another ship torpedoed in Billie - a dream prevents a torpedo-death in Tin Fish

World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sk - Sl-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites