I am coming to my witchcraft directly, but I pray you have patience with my proeme. I wish to narrate a dream which I had a few years ago (September 5, 1887), which had an intensity of reality. Dreams, you know, reader, vary from rainbow mist to London fog, and so on to clouds, or mud. This one was hard as marble in comparison to most. A few days previously I had written a letter to a friend, in which I had discussed this subject of the dual-Me, and it seemed as if the Dream were called forth by it in answer.
I thought I was in my bed—a German one, for I was in Homburg vor der Höhe—yet I did not know exactly where I was. I at once perceived the anomaly, and was in great distress to know whether I was awake or in a dream. I seemed to be an invalid. I realized, or knew, that in another bed near mine was a nurse or attendant. I begged her to tell me if I were dreaming, and to awake me if I were. She tried to persuade me that I was in my ordinary life, awake. I was not at all satisfied. I arose and went into the street. There I met with two or three common men. I felt great hesitation in addressing them on such a singular subject, but told them that I was in distress because I feared that I was in a dream, and begged them to shake or squeeze my arm. I forget whether they complied, but I went on and met three gentlemen, to whom I made the same request. One at once promptly declared that he remembered me, saying that we had met before in Cincinnatti. He pressed my arm, but it had no effect. I began to believe that I was really awake. I returned to the room. I heard a child speaking or murmuring by the nurse. I asked her again to shake my hand. This she did so forcibly that I was now perfectly convinced that it was no dream. And the instant it came home to me that it was a reality, there seized me the thrill or feeling as of a coming nightmare—and I awoke!
Reviewing my dream when awake, I had the deepest feeling of having been joué or played with by a master-mocker. I recalled that, when I rose in my night-robe from the bed, I did not dress—and yet found myself fully dressed when in the street. Then I remembered that when I returned to America, in 1879, I was in great apprehension lest I should have trouble and delay with our sixteen trunks, because there was under my charge a lady who was dying. To my great relief and amazement, the officer whose duty it was to search claimed me as an old acquaintance, who had met me and T. Buchanan Read, the poet, in Cincinnatti in 1864. But what impressed me most of all, at once, was that the whole was caused by, and was a keen and subtle mockery of my comments in my letter, of the other Ego, and of its sarcastic power. For I had been led, step by step, through the extremest doubt, to a full conviction of being awake, and then dismissed, as it were, with a snap or sneer into wakefulness itself!
Now this Dream Artist is, to judge by his works, a very different kind of a person from Me. We are not sympathetic, and herein lies a great and serious subject of study. “Dreams,” says a writer, “are the novels which we read when we are fast asleep,” and, at the risk of receiving punishment, I declare that my writer belongs to a school of novelists with which I have no feelings in common. If, as everybody assumes, it is always I who dream—only using other material—how is it that I always invariably disagree with, thwart, contradict, vex, and mock myself? I had rather be hanged and be done with it, before I would wrong my worst enemy with such pitiful, silly, degrading dreams and long-forgotten follies, as I am called on to endure. If this alter-ego were a lunatic, he could not be a more thoroughly uncongenial inmate of my brain than he often is. Our characters are radically different. Why has he a mind so utterly unlike mine? His tastes, his thoughts, dispositions, and petty peculiarities are all unlike mine. If we belonged to the same club, I should never talk with him.
Now we are coming to our Witchcraft. This alter-ego does not confine himself to dreams. A lunatic is a man who dreams wide-awake. He has lost his will or the controlling power resulting from the just co-relation of brain forces. Then the stored-up images stray out and blend. I have dreamed of telling or seeing things and of acting them at the same time. A fish and a watch and a man may seem to be the same thing at once in a dream, as they often are to a waking lunatic. A poet is a man who dreams wide-awake; but he can guide his dreams or imaginings to symmetrical form, and to a logical conclusion or coherence. With the painter and sculptor it is the same. When the alter-ego works harmoniously with the waking will, we call it Imagination.
But when the alter-ego draws decidedly on latent forces, or powers unknown to the waking Me, I am amazed. He does it often enough, that is certain. Then we have Mystery. And it is out of this that men have drawn the conclusion that they have two or three souls—an astral spirit, a power of prophecy, the art of leaving the body, and the entire machinery of occultism. Physiology is probably on the high road to explain it all, but as yet it is not explained.
Meanwhile it steals into our waking life in many ways. It comes in emotions, presentiments, harp tones, mystical conceptions, and minglings of images or ideas, and incomprehensible deductions, which are sometimes, of course, prophetic. It has nothing in common with common sense; therefore it is to some un-common sense, or to others non-sense. Sometimes it is one or the other. Agreeable sensations and their harmony become the Beautiful. These blend and produce a general æsthetic sense. It becomes mystical, and is easily worked on by the alter-ego. The most inspired passages of every poet on the beauty of Nature betray clearly the influence and hidden power of the Dream in waking life. Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, were all waking dreamers de la première force.
He who has heard an Æolian harp play—and I have heard the seven of Justinus Kerner in the old castle of Weibertreu when I was his guest—if he be a “tone-artist,” has often caught series of chords which were almost melodies. This music has the same relation to definite composition which the dream has to waking common sense. There are two things which I do not understand. One is, why composers of music make so little use of the suggestive Æolian harp; the second is, why decorative designers never employ the folding mirror[1] to produce designs. The one is an exact counterpart of the other, and both are capable of revealing inexhaustible harmonies, for both are deeply in accordance with the evolving processes of Nature.
The poetic or artistic faculty is, we therefore assume, the action on the myriad cells of memory by a strange—sometimes apparently involuntary—fantastic power, which is at the same time higher and lower than common sense or waking consciousness. Every image which man has received from sensation lies stored away in a cell, and is, in fact, a memory by itself. There is a faculty of association or sympathy by which groups of these images are called up, and there is perception which receives them, more or less vividly, like a photographic plate. When awake, Will, or coherent Common Sense, regulates all this machinery. When asleep, the Images seem to steal out and blend and frisk about by themselves in quaint dances, guided apparently by a kind of power whom I have conventionally called the alter-ego. This power throws open brain or memory-cells, which waking Common Sense has forgotten; in their chaotic or fantastic searches and mingling they produce poetry; they may chance on prophecy, for if our waking self had at command the immense latent knowledge in which these elves revel, it would detect sequences and know to what many things would lead, now unto us all unknown.
I once knew a nobleman who inherited in Italy a palace which he had never seen. There were in it three hundred rooms, and it had belonged to a family which had for six hundred years collected and handed down to their descendants every kind of object, as if they had been magpies or ravens. The heir, as a grave, earnest man, only concerned himself with the armoury and picture gallery and principal rooms. But his young daughter Bertha ranged all over the place and made hundreds of the most singular discoveries. One day she came to me very much delighted. She had found an obscure room or garret, in which there were ranged about on shelves, “sitting up and all looking at her,” several hundred old dolls and marionettes. For two hundred years or more the family had kept its old dolls. In this case the father was the waking reason, the rooms the brain cells, and Bertha the sprite who ranges over all and knows where to find forgotten images in store. Many of those whom we meet in dreams are like the ghosts of dolls.