Casey Wilkerson Rhetoric April 20, 2002 Was it a Dream or Hallucination?           Guy de Maupassant is a French author whose stories are commonly based upon supernatural events. His short story "Was it A Dream?" is no exception. This story depicts mysterious corpses rising from their graves to correct epitaphs written on their tombstones and tells of a man who is dealing with the loss of his lover.           The protagonist is under tremendous emotional stress after the death of his lover and reveals this to the reader when he says he considers "opening the window and throwing myself out into the street" (289). Needless to say, the man is in a very unstable mental condition. Maupassant also makes it clear the man is in denial of an unfaithful lover. Early in the story, readers are given a hint to this when a priest refers to the man's lover as his mistress. The man was very upset by this suggestion and states that "as she was dead nobody had the right to say that any longer, and I turned him [the priest] out" (288).           The man's way of dealing with his loss is to repress painful memories of the deceased, and this is evident in his refusal to listen to the priest. However, as Norman L. Keltner and his associates point out, excess repression can be harmful to mental health (32). As if the loss of a loved one was not upsetting enough, diminishing mental heath merely added to his problems.           When the man decides to spend the night weeping on his lover's grave, he is trying to gain closure for her death. The man continues to cling to the belief his lover was faultless and that her love equaled his. That night at the cemetery the man's hallucinations begin and his coping mechanism gets out of hand.           McLeod Health describes a hallucination as "sensations that are not real. Any of the senses can be involved." The fact that the man thinks he saw "a naked skeleton, pushing the stone back with its bent back" (Maupassant 291-292) proves he is suffering from hallucinations. The speaker is also suffering from auditory hallucinations, and this is revealed when he states, "I heard something as well. What? A confused nameless noise" (291). There is consolation for the man because "after someone dies it is normal for people who were close to that person to see or hear that individual on occasion" (McLeod Health). So the man may not have been crazy after all, but at this point in the story he still has not faced the fact that his lover was unfaithful.           The man's hallucinations actually help reveal the truth. After all the corpses had risen to correct the lies written on their tombstones, the speaker returns to his lover's grave. When the man first visited the grave earlier that evening, it read, "she loved, was loved, and died" (Maupassant 289). After his hallucinations began, he returned to her grave later that night. Now he saw a new inscription: "Having gone out one day, in order to deceive her lover, she caught cold and died" (293). This hallucination makes him realize the woman had faults too, and that she had deceived him.           The man in this story was probably suffering from severe sleep deprivation which can also lead to hallucinations (McLeod Health). There are two types of hallucinations dealing with sleep deprivation. The Thomson Corporation points out that one of them, Hypnogogic, is a "hallucination, such as the sensation of falling that occurs at the onset of sleep." This is most likely what the man was suffering from since he does not remember falling asleep, but does recall he was found the next morning in the cemetery. Instead of getting the sleep the speaker was in dire need of, he wandered through the cemetery half the night, further exhausting himself to the point of hallucinations. This is when the man starts to believe he sees the dead rising from their graves to deface their own tombstones.           It is common knowledge that mental stress involved in the grief process can cause the most stable people to lose sleep. It is never directly stated that the man was suffering from sleep loss, but at the end of the story he says "it appears they found me at daybreak, lying on the grave unconscious" (293). The fact that the man spent the entire night on the cold grave of an unfaithful lover leads the reader to believe he is so fatigued after his hallucinations he did not even have the strength to find a suitable resting place. The man's exhaustion gives an appropriate answer to the cause of his ghostly hallucinations.           It is obvious the speaker is dealing with an enormous amount of stress, so it's reasonable to assume hallucinations may have been one of the effects. The man not only had to deal with the loss of a loved one, but also the possibility his lover died as a consequence of her deception. In this story Maupassant implies through the speaker's heartbreaking hallucinations that no man or woman is without fault. Sources Cited Keltner, Norman et al. Psychiatric Nursing. 2nd ed. St. Louis: Mosby-Year Book Incorporated,           1995. Maupassant, Guy de. "Was it a Dream?" 21 Apr. 2002 <www.kikos.homestead.com>. McLeod Health. "Hallucinations." 21 Apr. 2002 <www.mcleodhealth.org>. Thomson Health Corporation. "Hallucinations." 21 Apr. 2002 <www.ehendrick.org>.