"Something uncanny": the dream structure in Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at
Owl Creek Bridge."
Peter Stoicheff
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" has received more critical attention than any other single work by Ambrose Bierce. This is probably because it combines into one text the best ingredients distributed among much of Bierce's fiction - satire, irony, manipulation of the reader, the exposure of human self-deception, a surprise ending, and a stylistic compression and tautness. It may also be because something of the story still eludes its commentators, leaving a residual and "uncanny" (to use Bierce's convenient term in the text) sense of revelation hovering just beyond one's grasp. Peyton Farquhar's death at the end is a surprise, so carried away are we by his desire for escape; yet it seems somehow presaged by the very description that keeps it, until the story's last paragraph, obscure and unanticipated. As Stuart
C. Woodruff, one of the story's closest analysts, puts it, "[s]omehow the reader is made to participate in the split between imagination and reason, to feel that the escape is real while he knows it is not" (157; Woodruff's emphasis).
Interpretations of the story have generally regarded the surprise of the ending structurally, and have discussed how the reader is lured into believing Farquhar's escape by "an ideal and patently sentimentalized vision of Peyton Farquhar's imagined reunion with his wife and home"
(Ames 53) and by a series of narrative devices that confuse Farquhar's subjective experience with objective description. But the simultaneity of knowledge and mystification produced in the story's crucial third section is deftly arranged by Bierce in a very different manner as well.
Details of Farquhar's death by hanging persistently intersect with much of the description of his apparent journey, a journey that is actually a distortion of the sensation of hanging and not merely a disengaged reverie of his escape from it. In his perceptive reading, Woodruff senses how Farquhar's illusion of escape acquires "a dream's irrational logic" (159) - in fact it does so not just in general metaphoric terms, but with great psychological precision and detail. A repression of the literal hanging into the fulfillment of the wish to be free from it, the
"escape" experienced by Farquhar essentially combines the principles of dreaming that Freud would articulate a decade later in The Interpretation of Dreams with those first published in
1861 in Le Sommeil et les Reves by the French writer Louis Ferdinand Alfred Maury. The
"uncanny" aspect of Bierce's text becomes, at this level, the obscured yet explicable nature of
Farquhar's strange experience, predicting Tzvetan Todorov's 1970 distinction in The Fantastic between its genres of the "marvelous" (in which "new laws of nature must be entertained to account for [a text's] phenomena") and the "uncanny," a text in which the reader believes
"the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described"
(41).(1)
In what was probably the most influential study of dreams in the nineteenth century, Maury offers the description of his own dream in which, after a series of related events, he is about to be guillotined during the French Revolution. At the culmination of the dream, he experiences a sharp pain in his neck, waking only to find that a portion of his bed has collapsed upon that region of his body, generating the grotesque sensation of beheading that

concludes the dream. With this type of dream as his model, Maury explores the relationship between external or objective phenomena and the content of dreams, concluding that dreams do indeed have their source in such phenomena. Maury leaves unexplained the curious capacity of a dream to anticipate through the production of its narrative the very climax to be provided by the external phenomenon, though the French psychologists Egger and Le Lorrain would try to account for it in 1895 (Freud 21). Most likely, the dreamer recalls the narrative of the dream as moving in a linear fashion toward its climax, whereas the narrative events that seem to precipitate the climax may actually follow it in the dreamer's unconscious, not culminated by the external phenomenon but generated by it. Or the narrative events may be produced in the dream extremely quickly, during the time it takes for the phenomenon to occur and the dreamer to register it - a few seconds or less, say, in the case of Maury's collapsing bed. During the time between the beginning of an alarm clock's ring and the dreamer's shutting it off, for instance, he or she may dream the narrative events, in response to the external stimulus that is sustained across the length of the dream but that is registered with increased intensity as the dreamer begins to awaken.
The relationship between objective phenomena and the dream narrative described by Maury is similar to Farquhar's experience in the third section of Bierce's story - so similar, in fact, that we might use the term "dream" in this technical sense for the "occurrence" in Farquhar's mind described in that section. In other words, when Bierce casts about for a psychologically reatistic structure for the intimate experience of the mind undergoing death, he chooses this model of the dream as the most proximate and familiar, consistently weaving external stimuli into the details of Farquhar's dream narrative of escape in almost, but not entirely, unrecognizable form.
The premise of the third section of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is that Farquhar imagines his escape in the brief interval between the removal of the plank that supports him and his actual death by hanging. That time is somewhat indeterminate in the story, as it is for at least two reasons in actuality. Some hanging victims die immediately, while others struggle for several seconds - death in these cases becoming a more gruesome and gradual process.
More significantly for Bierce's purposes, though, is that "time" itself, when employed to calibrate human experience, seems to become indeterminate at points of maximum emotional disturbance. Though the time it takes for Farquhar to die by hanging is indeterminate, Bierce goes to some length to imply that at the unknowable threshold of death itself time becomes crucially altered and even paradoxical, resistant to commonplace reciprocities of sensation and duration.(2) (The distortion is mirrored in the narrative itself, whose "time" is suspended at the end of the first section and reversed in the second - bold anachrony and analepsis, which are literally impossible and at the same time perfectly acceptable to the reader.) His account in the third section suggests that, within a short time period, sensation does not become effaced, but instead divides itself into infinite units of experience, saturating the mind with stimuli. From this perspective, "time" becomes vertiginous, the span of a second dilating to reveal ever increasing interior units of time, which themselves repeat the process of fractal division. Thus it may take "only" a "split second" for Farquhar to transform from a sensate being to an insensate one (for Farquhar is "as one already dead" within that short time, after

all), but that moment itself encounters the threshold of time's erasure, in effect turning time inside out to reveal Blake's eternity in an hour.
The third section corroborates this through a complex association of Farquhar's body, and emotional sensation, with the pendulum. The fact that he "swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a vast pendulum' (35) suggests the retarded ("What a sluggish stream!'[30]) quality of the time units Farquhar experiences once the execution begins, assisted by other details of protracted time ("ages later, it seemed to him" [34]), and of intensified sensation
("pains . . . beat[ing] with an inconceivably rapid periodicity" [35]). Throughout this simultaneously swift and sluggish journey from sensation to its effacement, Farquhar is
"conscious of motion," and that consciousness will divide into the minute sensations of physical escape down the creek, as the few seconds for death to "occur" will divide almost infinitesimally into the 24 hours that the escape becomes in his dream. n3 The point that
Bierce makes through the "greater infrequency" of Farquhar's watch at the end of section one is not just that time has seemed to slow, as critics argue, but the opposite as well, that sensation has expanded to open time up from the inside as it were, and to prolong it - a transformation necessary for the third section to operate as it does.
Crucial to the principle of the dream that structures this section, however, is the fact that the pendulum is not only a significant metaphor for time and its infinitely divisible (thus
"inconceivably rapid" and "unthinkable" [35]) periodicity; it is also a most accurate simile for
Farquhar's body , which "swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge." Farquhar is "conscious of [the] motion . . . of a vast pendulum" (35) because his body literally traces it, and he peripherally senses it, in the last stage in this extended drama of hanging, time, and consciousness - just as the weight of the actual bedstead, peripherally sensed by Maury in his transition from sleep to waking, becomes in his dream the "guillotine" blade on his neck.
Similar intrusions of other objective stimuli into Farquhar's experience permeate the third section. The "sharp report" (38) of the firing gun, its slightly later "dulled thunder" (40), and the ostensible "explosion" (41) of the cannon that "was cracking and smashing the branches in the forest beyond" (41) are Farquhar's dreamed revision of the sound of his own neck breaking. Bierce effectively underlines the association, describing the literal event of the breaking neck as occurring "with the sound like the shock of a cannon" (41) at the story's conclusion. n4 Farquhar's sensation of "rising toward the surface" of the water is the dreamer's interpretation of the slight bounce the body describes after reaching the extremity of its flexible rope; the sensation of almost drowning in the creek revises the fact of strangulation itself; the "horribly" aching neck and the "uncomfortably warm" bullet impossibly
"lodged between his collar and his neck" (40) under the water reinterpret the pain of hanging; the "counter-swirl" (39) that spins him around in the current recasts the twisting at the end of the rope; the projecting point which concealed him from his enemies" (42) transforms the bridge (or the plank) now above him; the sensation of his own tongue "thrusting forward from between his teeth into the cold air" registers its grotesque protrusion during strangulation; the inability to "feel the roadway beneath his feet" is a similarly accurate impression, obediently

revised into an understandable fatigue, thirst and numbness near the end of his narrative of escape.
The sense of strangulation, the sound of the cannon, and the pendular motion are the three objective stimuli that appear most frequently in various dream distortions in the third section.
They trigger Farquhar's narrative of escape, and then are extracted and redistributed across it without regard for their actual external sequence (respectively strangulation, breaking neck, pendular motion) in much the same way that an external stimulus of some duration, such as an alarm clock's ring, will simultaneously generate and become situated within the linear narrative of a dream. Various other details of the "escape" that have been explained merely as examples of Bierce's alerting the reader to its unreality might be accounted for mithin this dream structure as well. n5 For instance, the ability to hear "the rush of [a fish's] body parting the water" (38) is no doubt impossible, as several readers have concluded, but within
Farquhar's suddenly interior world generated by external stimuli it is one conceivable distortion of a final rushing heartbeat sounding amid the "congestion" (35) of the hanged man's head as he dreams of being in the water below. n6
At the beginning of his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud surveys Maury's explanation of dreams as triggered by objective phenomena. Though he does not discount the importance of external stimuli as dream generators, Freud disputes their status as the unique source of dreams, and points out that the crucial questions of why "the dreaming mind misjudges the nature of the objective sensory stimulus" (22), and why a single stimulus like an alarm clock can generate varying dream responses on different occasions, remain unanswered. The external stimulus, he writes, is "the layman's" most familiar explanation of dreams, but scientific investigation must go further, to consider why "the stimulus influencing the senses during sleep does not appear in the dream at all in its true form, but is replaced by some other presentation which is in some way related to it" (21). In other words, the objective sensory stimulus "plays only a modest part as a dream source," and most likely "other factors determine the choice of the memory picture to be evoked" (23).
The remainder of The Interpretation of Dreams explores this speculation, eventually defining the dream as "the (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish" (136), the result of a powerful "censor" that disfigures the inadmissible "latent content" of the dream (drawn from the individual's psychic life, not from external stimuli) into the more palatable "manifest content" that is the registered and remembered dream. Understanding the principles (what
Freud famously calls "the dream-work") by which this disfigurement operates ("condensation,"
"displacement," and "representability" or "dramatization") permits a return to the latent content; and, more profoundly for Freud, it thereby exposes the otherwise hidden unconscious and the mysterious censors obscuring it.
At first glance, Farquhar's wish is not the kind that necessarily requires repression, for there is nothing inadmissible about the desire to escape death - unless that desire were deemed dishonorable, a qualification that clearly does have bearing on the situation in this story, whose protagonist longs for "the larger life of the soldier" (32). Thus the breathless rhetoric of heroism ("What splendid effort! - what magnificent, what superhuman strength! Ah, that was

a fine endeavor!") with which Farquhar observes his own unfolding drama, is employed in an attempt to suppress the inadmissible cowardice of the desire to escape, and to render it in terms of gallantry, not defeat. In this manner, Bierce apparently moves beyond the "layman's knowledge" of external stimulus to explore how, in Freud's words, other factors determine the choice of the memory picture . . . evoked" in Farquhar's dream of escape. The external stimuli provided by hanging could generate many different types of dream narratives; yet Farquhar's includes many details that are not accounted for by those stimuli exclusively, but can be understood within Freud's model of the dream-work. The whole narrative of escape itself is an example of this. Though it is not the only possible narrative that such external stimuli might generate, it results from the specific conditions of Farquhar's own existence as a would-be soldier powerfully attracted by the prospect of victory against all odds. Improbable details of the narrative are not just Bierce's clues to the reader that it is not "occurring": they function importantly as "dream disfigurements" (Freud 135), appropriate and interpretable distortions of Farquhar's psychic life.
An example of the psychic factors determining the dream's structure exists in the second paragraph of the third section, where the description of Farquhar's dream of escape truly begins. The fact of unavoidable death is so powerfully suppressed here that it is revised not only into an escape from death but further, into a vivid dream of birth itself. As Farquhar tries to reach the surface of the inexplicably deep creek after the hanging rope has broken, his first task is to free himself from the cord that binds his hands behind his back. After he does so, he watches his hands, as if they were someone else's, as they "pounced upon the noose at his neck. They tore it away and thrust it fiercely aside, its undulations resembling those of a water-snake" (36). Farquhar may dream of his hands in this manner because the act of hanging intensifies and eventually obliterates sensation within the extremities (for we must still recall the external stimulus that lies behind Bierce's structuring of the dream), and thus they would seem to be separate from his own body. n7 However, the imagery of the cord around the neck, and of its being removed by someone else, situates this phenomenon not merely in the dream episode of rising to the creek's surface, but in a dream of the experience of birth - a kind of dream-within-a-dream, and a painful one at that, for the external stimulus of suffocation by hanging is revised here to become the baby's sensation of the umbilical cord around its neck. n8
This dream-within-a-dream extends to its logical culmination of birth, generated by the encompassing narrative's account of Farquhar rising to the surface of the creek: the
"disobedient hands" of the infant "forced him to the surface" and he "felt his head emerge; his eyes were blinded by the sunlight; his chest expanded convulsively, and with a supreme and crowning agony his lungs engulfed a great draught of air, which instantly he expelled in a shriek!" (37) This subtext of birth suppressing the literal fact of death is perhaps the clearest example of the story's persistent distortion and conflation of time, compressing the poles of human temporal experience into a paradoxically simultaneous occurrence.'
One of its most suggestive details, considering the Freudian context of this reading, is the cord's violently being torn away, securing the baby's life and separating it from the mother at the same time. The removal is "succeeded by the direst pang that he had yet experienced"

(37), prompting him to request ("Put it back, put it back!") that it be re-attached. The literal pain of death by hanging is temporarily revised here to become that of birth, itself a shocking experience (the "first and direst of all disasters" writes Bierce in The Devil's Dictionary), which
Farquhar's dream displaces into a longing for the prenatal state, a desire commonly precipitated by crisis in the individual's life, as Freud argues. n9
If Freud was the first clinician to recognize and articulate that there was more to the dreamwork than Maury's distortion of external phenomena, he marvels that dreams were nevertheless "formed with perfect correctness" (81n) in some literature, and to some extent expressed within the mythic substructures of many primitive cultures. n10 Bierce's delineation of the dream model here is an ideal example, making his story remarkable not so much because he dupes the reader in it, but because through the intuitive employment of Maury's and Freud's dream models he generates and sustains the uncanny impression of unconscious reality.
(1) Bierce's term foreshadows at least two other disparate and specific uses of it. Freud defines the uncanny, in his 1919 essay of that name, as "that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar" (1958: 123-24), an accurate description of the third section's temporary suppression of external phenomena by the dream, and of the dream narrative's compulsion to return "home." Indeed, Freud's term "Unheimlich," usually translated "uncanny," literally means "un-homely" or "un-homelike." As part of the deconstructive vocabulary, it names the indeterminacy of all textual significance, a neat formulation for the meshing of latent desire and external phenomena that creates specific aspects of Farquhar's dream. (2) Logan, and earlier Grenander, point out that Bierce had speculated on what we do not know, the duration of the experience of dying itself, in his essay on the proposed introduction of judicial electrocution, "The Chair of Little Ease": "Through what unnatural exaltation of the senses may not the moment of its accomplishing be commuted into unthinkable cycles of time?" (Bierce, Works 11: 366). (3) The execution occurs beneath "the early sun" (30), and the apparent escape and subsequent journey encompass the following day and night, culminating in the "morning sunshine" (44) about 24 hours later.
(4) For the real "student of hanging" ("Occurrence" 34) a few forensic points of interest: With
"complete suspension" of the body (where the feet do not touch the ground) "there is a fracturing of the petechiae and thyroid cartilage and hyoid bone" (Luke et al. 1143). Whether this would cause detectable sound is debatable; whether the victim would experience any sound is unknowable. The notion that a severe break occurs has been criticized as untenable, in fact (Sturrock 237). However, Bierce, like everyone else at the time, would have been under the impression that the severe crushing of the spinal cord takes place. (5) Ames, for instance, describes Farquhar's experience in section three as moving "from the improbable
[the breaking of the rope] through the impossible [heating the fish under water] to the unreal
[the closing episode of the narrative of escape]" (65). Logan calls Farquhar's perceptions in the third paragraph of the third section "preposterous" (109) and, as such, an obvious clue for the reader that the experience is an illusion. Woodruff points out that the very concreteness
[of these ostensible perceptions) gives the escape an authentic ring of truth . . . [and] keeps persuading the reader that perhaps the impossible has happened . . ." (158). (6) Logan (110) and Davidson (52) each point out Bierce's subtle emphasis on this looking within: Farquhar's

ability to see from a distance the "grey eye" of the soldier aiming his rifle at him is impossible, creating another vcrtiginous instance in which Farquhar (with "dark gray" eyes) actually regards himself and not something exterior. (7) A detail near the end of the story functions in a similar way: "The wood on cither side was full of singular noises, among which - once, twice, and again - he distinctly heard whispers in an unknown tongue" (44). The "unknown tongue" signifies a language unrecognized by Farquhar, corroborating the joumey within the "wild region" that is both familiar and foreign. It is also a macabre (and Freudian) play on words, for, like his hands, which seem to be someone else's, his protruding tongue, which is devoid of sensation at the moment of death, literally seems detached from his own body. (8) Davidson comes close to recognizing this subtext of birth (but stops just short of doing so) when she uses it as a metaphor for Farquhar's newly liberated self while he is "escaping": "Farquhar, in the water, underwent a perceptual baptism. He was born again into a world he had never before conceived, a world free from the death-dealing language of war and the misleading rhetoric of patriotism" (51). Not only the metaphoric, but also the psychologically realistic, determines the actual creation of the birth subtext by Bierce, though - and a testament to the strength of its suggestiveness is the very metaphor Davidson employs. (9) Freud believed that birth provided "the first experience of anxiety and therefore the source and model of the affect of anxiety," as he added in a footnote to the 1909 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams
(400-Oln). In Inbibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926) he would return to this phenomenon.
Otto Rank went further (too far for Freud's liking), arguing in his 1925 The Trauma of Birth that birth is the most crucial experience in the individual's psychic development, and thus more important than sexuality itself (10) Resonating nicely with Bierce's statement that
Farquhar while dreaming "was as one already dead" is the fact that in "the Sushruta Samhita, which deals with surgical experiences of ancient India, largely taken from Vedic literature . . . the patient who dreams of . . . again entering into the womb of his mother, or thinks he is falling from the summit of a mountain or into a dark or dismal cave, or . . . being carried away by the current of a river, . . . is already a doomed being" (Woods 55).
Works Cited
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Davidson, Cathy N. The Experimental Fictions of Ambrose Bierce: Structuring the Ineffable.
London: U of Nebraska P, 1984. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. 3rd ed.
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