The Bride of Dreams

by Frederik van Eeden

"The ghastly people of the realm of dreams,"

and of whose miserable existence and restless activity neither he, nor Goethe, nor any other of the world's sages and seers ever doubted.

Indeed, would not this doubt signify that we are ourselves responsible for the multitude of horrible, utterly vulgar, heinous and vile or obscene illusions that menace us at night and yet all bear an unmistakable imprint of thought and imagination, compiled with reason and deliberation, and thus betray a thinking mind though a low-thinking one? Do you not know the dream in which you know yourself to be guilty of murder, of bloody murder through covetousness, of theft, or of plotting to kill and inciting the innocent to it -with all the horrid retinue of fear of discovery and lies upon lies to escape it? And do you hold your own soul responsible for this? Or do you believe that chance can beget such artfully contrived complexities?

It was this sort of deception that incited me to indignant defiance. The war I had to carry on by day against my troublesome passions, also put me on my guard at night, and I would not absolve myself with the excuse that sleep renders irresponsible. For I knew that it was I, myself, I, Lodovico Muralto, an honest, well-meaning fellow, who in the dream-life of night had done and felt all kinds of malicious wicked and low-minded things, and I would not have it.

Not only the baseness, but also the absurdities of dreams, exasperated me. Night after night I was imposed upon and led about by the nose in the most ridiculous fashion. It often seemed as though my most earnest resolutions and most sacred feelings were the very ones to draw their shafts of ridicule. And morning after morning it was not only with surprise, but also with growing shame and wrath that I discovered on awakening, how absurdly I had again been fooled. This could not issue from myself, it must have been thrust on me; it was suggestion, infusion, that menaced and confounded my mind and judgment, and I was determined not to endure it. I would not stand it and earnestly sought a means of defending my healthy soul and free judgment. Thus I may say that my vehement lifelong struggle for self-purification and advance toward salvation was doubled, being carried on by night as well as by day, and indeed to great advantage. For it is the same soul, and they are the same forces which by night as well as by day act and react upon one another, and life with the physical senses of day has been made not a little clearer to me by the nightly senseless life.

I accustomed myself to memorize carefully in the morning what had occurred to me throughout the night, and in the evening before going to sleep to form fixed resolutions, auto-suggestions which should continue working also in my dream life.

And I realized that the first essentials were: observation, attention, self-consciousness also in dreams. Who would not be cheated must be on his guard. Thus while dreaming, I wanted above all to realize that I was dreaming and not to lose the tie of memory connecting me with the day-life. Every night I stood before the dark cavern of sleep, like Theseus with Ariadne's thread in his hand, and I knew, as you perhaps do too, reader, through chance experience - that such retention of memory is possible. Has it not happened to you often while dreaming that startled by some dangerous beast, or confronted by a steep precipice, you have calmed yourself with the vague consciousness: after all it's nothing but a dream? This consciousness I wished to cultivate and to strengthen until it should become fixed and lasting. And after a while, one night while dreaming of a blossoming orchard in Italy, I succeeded in observing with thorough consciousness. I saw the branches as they crossed one another, and the festoons of vines stretching from tree to tree, whilst I soared through, a few yards from the ground, with a pale blue sky above me. And while observing yet more closely I pondered how it was possible to reproduce so exactly and minutely in a vision obviously emanating from myself and which I had myself created, the apparent motions of these myriad crossing twigs and the confusion of the young foliage. And in my dream, and realizing that I was dreaming, I came to the conclusion that this vision must be a reality, an objective reality as the philosophers of reason would say, because to me - the observer - it manifested a distinctly personal existence. As I soared by, the twigs described their apparent motions exactly as I had observed by day, and how should I, who could not even draw a tree, be able to create these extraordinarily compiled moving images? And at the same time, now thoroughly wide awake in the midst of what I recognized as a deep sound sleep, I pondered upon the visionary impressions of day-life which have been explained by the effect upon the wonderfully constructed eye, of infinitely fine, infinitely swift vibrations of light, which are sent out from objects whose construction includes a no less complicated combination of billions and trillions of molecules - and how these identical impressions with exactly the same results were now attained, as a clearly felt and calmly observed reality, while my eyes were shut and the world of day-life remote - thus that there must be something which could reproduce all these infinite combinations of light vibrations and molecular motions with an absolutely equivalent effect.

And before having yourself tasted such delight, reader, you cannot imagine my elation when, on awakening, I found that my attempt had met with success, that I had gone on observing - attentively observing, and thinking - thinking deeply and clearly, with full recollection and calm self-consciousness in that mysterious, senseless sphere of wonder and deception.

The philistine philosophers will talk of "delusion" and contend that only the perceptions of day are real and those of sleep a mere delusion. But I have said it before: there is no delusion, or - everything is delusion. What realities does the day possess beyond perception? And because the perceptions of sleep are more fleeting, more unconnected, more mysterious, does it follow that they do not exist or that they deserve no attention? Through the very strangeness of their nature, which has no need of our senses, their study promises richer revelations than are found in day-life, but what they primarily demand is steadiness and clearness of the mind that would contemplate them, with the same purpose and precision with which the realities of day-life are searched.

My delight at this first success filled me all the day, and the comfort and joy found in this unexplored domain of study has not forsaken me to the present day and has helped me to bear a hard life with fortitude.