For the manifestations of day-life, the only ones that attract the attention of the searchers, do not reach beyond the grave and end with the withering of the body. But the manifestations of sleep, yet unexplored and unmeasured, begin where the eyes are shut, the ears do not hear, the skin does not feel, and extend into the regions concerning which we want enlightenment as much as - yes, even more than - concerning the sphere of day.
As long as I can remember, I have always been a great and vivid dreamer; therefore I know I must count myself among the breakers of suggestion, among the pathfinders, just as you too, dear reader and sympathizer, are one of them. And therefore, also, when the ideas of the group and traditional creed became too narrow for me and neither the words of my great hero brothers, nor intercourse with my contemporaries, nor the latest discoveries of science could satisfy me, I could forthwith see an outlet and discover light on a path which no one had yet pointed out to me and none, before me, had trod. Thus my alienation from the world has not made me unruly. Thus alone is it possible for me to find peace and contentment in this life amid narrow, sordid souls and barbarians. For aside from my monotonous daily life, with brief moments of rapture aroused by the beauty of these low lands and the sea, by work and study, I have the rich nights full of marvelous mystic realities which I gratefully and attentively observe and record by day. Thus, despite the loss of all that was dear to me, I am happy in the consciousness of being a useful laborer in the fields of the future, ploughing.
"For the promise of a later birth
The wilderness of this Elysian earth."
Before, therefore, speaking to you of my marriage to Lucia del Bono and the long, outwardly prosperous period following, I must acquaint you with my nocturnal observations.
The dreams of terror and bliss, that to you too surely are not unknown, I dreamed with vivid intensity. And it had immediately struck me that their vehement sensations - the inexplicable, deadly, hopeless terror and disgust or the wondrous, perfect bliss were quite disproportionate to, and could not be explained by, the things we saw and experienced in the dream. I remember a dream of a bare, gray room, without windows or furniture, and moving about in a corner some indistinct object, whose terrifying weird impression could make me shudder even by day; another one of a small, narrow, square courtyard enclosed by high walls overgrown with ivy, which was also gruesome and appalling beyond description, - and then again blissful dreams of meetings with a strange youth or maiden in some unknown garden, or in a rocky valley with gigantic golden-leaved chestnut trees, whose memory filled me with sweet delight for days and weeks - yes! that even now in my old age can make me happy when I vividly recall them.
No one hearing such a dream recounted would be able to comprehend its impressions of terror or delight. Only this was plain to we - that the blissful dreams dealt with love. In my earliest youth it was a boy whom I would meet in my dreams and who by a single word, without much sense, would make me marvellously happy and the scenery around him glorious; later it was a girl. The boy and the girl returned several times, though not very often, and did not resemble any friend or sweetheart of my day-life.
At first the weird terror seemed much more mysterious, for it was connected in some unaccountable way with the simplest and most innocent objects and scenes I dreamed of.
We, indeed, talk of nightmare and usually seek its cause in a poor digestion and the doctors talk a great deal about improper circulation and suggest all kinds of remedies. But throughout a long life I have been a close observer and have come to the conclusion that indigestion and improper circulation are no more the cause of this nightly terror than of rain and wind, though a frail condition will make the one as well as the other harder to endure. Wait, my reader, until you are as old and experienced a dreamer as I am, and you shall see for yourself these terror-inspirers and bloodcurdlers, these buffoons and jesters at work in the shapes in which Breughel and Teniers portrayed them in so life-like a manner. You shall learn to know their tricks and malicious inventions, and the queer furnishings of their dwelling sphere. You shall learn to track them, as it were, - as the dog tracks the game - by their peculiar scent of gruesomeness. You shall see them unfolding their loathsome and dark spectacles before you -their battlefields reeking with blood, their swamps filled with corpses - besmirching your path with mud, and playing fantastic tricks on you without its causing you the slightest degree of alarm or fear, or depressing you as it did before you knew the cause of all these things - because now you apprehend them in their wretched malignity and dare to face them and, if need be, duly to chastise them.
These are the creatures that Shelley calls