This is the only true Night side of Nature, but its shadows and dusky twilight, and strangely-hued chiaroscuros and long pauses of gloom, come constantly into the sunlight of our waking life. Some lives have too much of it, some too little. Some receive it in coarse and evil forms, as lunatics, and sufferers from mania à potu; some canny people—happy Scotchmen, for instance—succeed in banishing it from life as nearly as is possible for a human being to do. Now to speak clearly, and to recapitulate distinctly, I set forth the following propositions:—
I. We have a conscious will which, whether it be an independent incomprehensible spirit, or simply the correlative result or action of all our other brain powers, exists, and during our waking hours directs our thoughts and acts. While it is at work in the world with social influences, its general tendency is towards average common sense.
II. This conscious will sleeps when we sleep. But the collective images which form memory, each being indeed a separate memory, as an aggregate of bees’ cells form a comb, are always ready to come forth, just as honey is always sweet, limpid, and fluid. There is between them all an associative faculty, or a strange and singular power, which begins to act when the will sleeps. Whether it be also an independent Self which plays capriciously while conscious will sleeps, or a result of correlated forces, it is not as yet possible to determine. What we know is, that it calls forth the images by association, and in a fantastic, capricious manner, imitates and combines what we have experienced, or read, or thought, during our waking hours.
III. Our waking will can only realize or act on such images as it has kept familiarly before it, or such as have been so often recalled that they recur spontaneously. But all the treasures of memory seem to be available to the dream ruler, and with them a loose facile power of grouping them into kaleidoscopic combinations. Thus, if one could imagine a kaleidoscope which at every turn made varied groups of human or other figures in different attitudes, with changing scenery; and then suppose this to be turned round by some simple vital or mechanical action, he would have an idea of the action of dreams. It is probable that the radical function of the dream-power is to prevent images from becoming utterly forgotten or rusty; and by exercising the faculty of facile or chance combination to keep awake in man originality and creativeness. For it is almost certain that, but for the intrusion of this faculty into our waking thoughts, man would become a mere animal, without an idea beyond the joint common appetites, instincts, and emotions of the lowest of his kind.
IV. The dream-power intrudes more or less into all waking life. Then it acts, though irregularly, yet in harmony, with conscious will. When it is powerful and has great skill in forming associations of images—and by images I mean, with Kay, “ideas”—and can also submit these to waking wisdom, the result is poetry or art. In recalling strange, beautiful images, and in imagining scenes, we partly lapse into dreaming; in fact, we do dream, though conscious will sits by us all the time and even aids our work. And most poets and artists, and many inventors, will testify that, while imagining or inventing, they abstract the “mind” from the world and common-place events, seek calm and quiet, and try to get into a “brown study,” which is a waking dream. That is to say, a condition which is in some respects analogous to sleep is necessary to stimulate the flow and combination of images. This brown study is a state of mind in which images flow and blend and form new shapes far more easily than when Will and Reason have the upper hand. For they act only in a conventional beaten track, and deal only with the known and familiar.
V. Magic is the production of that which is not measured by the capacity of the conscious working will. The dream spirit, or that which knows all our memories, and which combines, blends, separates, scatters, unites, confuses, intensifies, beautifies, or makes terrible all the persons, scenes, acts, events, tragedies, or comedies known to us, can, if it pleases, by instantaneous reasoning or intuition, perceive what waking common sense does not. We visit a sick man, and the dream spirit, out of the inexhaustible hoards of memory aided by association, which results in subtle, occult reasoning, perceives that the patient will die in a certain time, and this result is served up in a dramatic dream. The amount of miracles, mysteries, apparitions, omens, and theurgia which the action of these latent faculties cause, or seem to cause, is simply illimitable, for no man knows how much he knows. Few, indeed, are the ordinary well-educated Europeans of average experience of life, whose memories are not inexhaustible encyclopædias, and whose intellects are not infinite; if all that is really in them could be wakened from slumber, “know thyself” would mean “know the universe.” Now, there are people who, without being able to say why, are often inspired by this power which intuitively divines or guesses without revealing the process to common sense. They look into the eye of a person—something in glances and tones, gestures, mien, and address, suggests at once an assertion or a prediction which proves to be true. Considering that the dream-power has millions of experiences or images at its command, that it flits over them all like lightning, that it can combine, abstract, compare, and deduct, that it being, so to speak, more of a thaumaturgical artist than anything else, excels waking wisdom in subtle trickery, the wonder is, not that we so often hear of marvellous, magical, inexplicable wonders, but that they are not of daily or hourly occurrence. When we think of what we might be if we could master ourselves, and call on the vast sea of knowledge which is in the brain of every one who reads these lines, to give strict reckoning of its every wave and every drop of water, and every shell, pebble, wreck, weed, or grain of sand over which it rolls, and withal master the forces which make its tides and storms, then we may comprehend that all the wonder-working power attributed to all the sorcerers of olden time was nothing compared to what we really have within us.
It is awful, it is mysterious, it is terrible to learn this tremendous truth that we are indeed within ourselves magicians gifted with infinite intellectual power—which means the ability to know and do all things. In the past men surmised the existence of this infinite memory, this power of subtle research and combination, but between them and the truth in every land and time interposed the idea of objective spiritual or supernatural existences whose aid or medium was necessary to attain to wisdom. Outside of us was always Somebody Else to be invoked, conciliated, met in vision or trance, united to in spiritual unity or syncope. Sometimes they hit upon some form of hypnotism or mesmerism, opiates or forced swoons and convulsions, and so extorted from the nerves and dream-power some of their secrets which were all duly attributed to the “spirits.” But in the whole range of occult literature from Hermes Trismegistus down to Madame Blavatsky there is not a shade of a suspicion that all the absolutely authentic marvels of magic began and ended with man himself.
Least of all did any speculator yet conjecture how to set forth on the path which leads us to this wonderland. For there is a way to it, and a power to master the infinite stores of memory and render the dream-power a willing servant, if we take the pains to do it. Firstly—as may be found asserted, and I think fairly proved, in my work on “Practical Education,” and in the “Memory of David Kay” (London, 1888)—every child by a very easy gradual process, simply that of learning by heart, and reviewing, can develope its memory to such a degree that all which that child reads, hears, or sees can be literally retained for life. Secondly, quickness of perception, which is allied to memory, can be taught so as to develope intuitive observation and intelligence to an equally incredible extent. Thirdly—and for this I have had abundant personal experience—every child can learn Design and the Minor Arts or develope the Constructive faculties, and by doing this alone a pupil becomes exceptionally clever in all studies. The proof of this is that the 200 pupils who attended an industrial or art school in Philadelphia took precedence in studies among 110,000 others in the public schools.
If all the stores of our memory were distinctly cognized by our waking will when they first came into our possession, we should have the first great element of power beyond all our present dreams of greatness. That this can be done has been recognized by many of the most advanced thinkers of the day. If a child be trained to exercise quickness of perception so that at last it observes and remembers everything—and experiment has proved this also—it will make the Dream Power a waking power absolutely in harmony and accordance with waking wisdom or conscious will. For the reason why the capricious, wild, strange fitful faculty has always remained foreign to us, is because in all our culture we have never sought to subdue and train the powers allied to it. Catch and tame one water-fairy, says the Red Indian legend, and you may get all her sisters. Waking quickness of perception is a wonderful ability. It can be trained to flit like lightning over illimitable fields of thought (supplied by a vast memory), and with them it spontaneously developes comparison and deduction. Now all of this is marvellously akin to the habitual action of the dream power plus that of reflection. And it is not possible to conceive that with waking quickness of perception, or voluntary subtlety of thought, cultivated in infancy to the highest power, its twin which sports in sleep should not feel its influence and act under it.
The result of this culture would inevitably be that the marvels, mysteries, and magic as they seem to us of the dream, or intuitive power, would be perfectly under our waking control, or to such an extent that we could secure all that is profitable in them. It is a very curious fact that while Reflection or Waking Wisdom slumbers, Quickness of Perception or Perception and Association seem to be always awake—in dreams or waking. A very extended series of observations has convinced me that the acquisition of a very great degree of Observation itself, or of Attention, is as possible as to learn French, and no harder; yet as a branch of study it literally does not exist. As a writer in the New York Tribune remarks: “In fact, observation is almost an atrophied faculty, and when a writer practises it for the purposes of his art, we regard the matter as in some sense wonderful.” Interest, as Maudsley has shown, is a natural result of Attention, and the two generate Will. Whether we can actually control the Dream-power is not as yet proved by experiment. All that we can say is that it is probable. But that this power manifests itself in waking hours when it submits to Reflection, is an established fact. It shows itself in all imagination, in all originality, brave art or “fantasy.” Therefore it is no extravagant deduction to conclude that all of its action which now seems so wonderful, and which has furnished the ground-work for what we call magic, is perfectly within our grasp, and may be secured by simple methods of training which require only perseverance to perfect them.