The Bride of Dreams

by Frederik van Eeden

From that night when Emmy appeared to me, at my summons, as my bride, I led for many years a double life, in which the incidents of the day did not seem more important to me than the observations of the night. A successful reunion with Emmy in the joy sphere of the dream was to me the best and most joyous event, that I desired more and remembered with more grateful satisfaction, than the most fortunate incident of my daily life. The few solitary moments in the night, recurring only a limited number of times during the long year, and perhaps lasting but a few minutes, in force of impression and deep after-effects outweighed the many days crowded with events, so that now it seems to me as though the years had flown by and I can measure and define them better by the visions of the nights than by the events of the day.

Yet my life was not empty, not barren in deeds and experience; but it was the ordinary life that thousands lead and that has already left so many wise and sensitive men unsatisfied, because they could not penetrate the deeper meaning, and saw death and destruction so unavoidably threatening them at the end of their career.

In accordance with my father's wishes, which my mother sanctioned, I became a diplomat and lived and worked in different countries, first as attaché and later as secretary of the legation. Outwardly my life was as prosperous as could be and all who knew me envied me, without therefore showing me ill will or seeking to harm me. I had a sweet, pretty wife who bore me four fair, healthy children, I had money enough for a life of luxury and plenty, and did my work with apparent devotion and success. Transferal was the cause of frequent travel, and I saw a large part of the civilized human world. We lived in sunny Madrid, fragrant with acacias and carnations, with its subtle dangerous atmosphere, its elegantly indolent culture, its desolate surroundings; - in restless Marseilles, full of crime and rabble, where we never felt safe; - in orderly, methodical, soberly bourgeois Berlin, where they strive so sagaciously and diligently for culture; - in blithe and beautiful Paris, where they still live on happily in the illusion that they are the leaders of civilization; - in the not less self-satisfied London, immutably grim in its sombreness, hardened in its dangerous luxury and misery, full of intellectual life, but without much sign of improvement, like a strong, prosperous, hardened villain; - in wanton St. Petersburg, with its extremely polished, yet withal ever equally barbarous luxury; - in vain, amusing Vienna, where all thought of the possibility of still higher culture has long ago been given up as insulting; - in the curiously grave and affected Washington, with its trim green lawns and white buildings of state in confectioner's style, with its blasé air of aristocratic calm and state in the midst of the bustling, bourgeois, informal but intensely living American world; - finally in the little, neat, doll-like Hague, that is so difficult to consider as real, where the good Hollanders play at Metropolis and where even the diplomatic world acquires the well-nigh comic aspect of a very chic and well-cast amateur stage.

I could not have borne this existence calmly, without the stay of my nocturnal experiences, without the constant preoccupation with the miracle that again and again befell me, without the remembrance of how I had last seen and heard Emmy, without the looking forward to her return, and the considering of what I would do and say and what I should observe in her the next time.

I did not therefore neglect my daily work; on the contrary, I performed it with vigor and perseverance solely on that account. But how others could cheerfully persevere in it I could not understand - unless they were insignificant persons, wholly governed by the power of formal religion and conventional patriotism. And I must admit, too, that the most advanced and independent of my colleagues did not continue their task without bitter self-derision and a sort of melancholy epicureanism. Diplomacy may be carried on with fine forms and on a grand scale, yet it remains nothing but an exceedingly narrow-minded bickering for the greatest profit, for the largest morsel. Something remarkable lies in the fact that the diplomat does not fight directly for his own profit, but identifies himself with the Government he represents. But what man fights for a really personal profit and not for a fancied one? Thus the zeal, the enthusiasm, the satisfaction of the diplomat is usually the same as that of the player moving wooden figures about on a board, and finding his pleasure in the making and the disentangling of confusion. But an earnest man asks after all: what is the good of it all? Wherefore do I work and let so many others work for me? My body which I keep in condition with so much care shall wither, the royal house or the Government for which I fight and exert myself some day shall fall after all; and though I fought not for myself, nor even for my Government and people, but for a still higher ideal - humanity - will it not also die some time when the earth shall dry up and become uninhabitable?

These questions must be answered, for it is not true that it is man's nature to go on working with courage and zeal without their being answered. No; if he now still goes on working without an answer, it is because he does not reflect. But it is truly man's nature to reflect and thus he is still making his living by denying his nature. This is a contradiction doomed to disappear. And I witnessed with pity the endeavors of the so-called religious people, like my good wife Lucia, to escape the chill wind of the new knowledge by the fostering of a worn, patched and half-decayed Church system. Her cheerful acquiescence and placid contentment in the enervated, marrowless shadow of what was once, for a more childish generation, a solid joy, seemed pathetic to me. Faithfully she sought her daily share of consecration, edification and purification, that every human spirit needs as much as the body needs a bath. But it was a dead, nerveless consecration through sounds and impressions from which the living thought, the soul, had long vanished. How could the poetry of the Hebrews and the thoughts of the Middle Ages still touch her? Only the hollow tones of the declaiming priests and the outward magnificence of the churchly edifice brought something like a fleeting shadow of the true sense of the divine. And in the poetry or music which she could really and wholly feel, in the art of her age, in the thought and science of her age - the living, direct expression of God - in these she did not seek, because round about her no one realized that only in these consecration is found, and must be sought for.

But for me, that which had been indicated by the meditative of all the ages, in vague, and for the most part impotent, expression, began to acquire a new, wonderful character of reality. I had learned to speak, to hear, to see, to taste, to smell, to touch, to create things and beings, and to enter into relations with what seemed to me independent beings, without having the body - that which is positively doomed to destruction - take part. What generation after generation had repeated one after the other as empty sound, idle chimera, or suggestion, the existence of a world beyond the senses, had for me become actual experience. I knew now that I had another body, beside the ordinary one, an animæ corpus, with a proper world of perception; and this knowledge rested upon equally good foundations as every one's knowledge concerning the existence of his ordinary body. Time and again I faced the undeniable wonder of another space, perceived by the selfsame I, from the same centre of observation, as the space by day.

What some sages had presumed and concluded by speculation - that what we call room and place is nothing but one of the infinitely numerous ways of perception of our being that neither taken up room nor occupies space, the ego that is neither here nor there - had become for me an ordinary fact, the knowledge of which influenced all my thought. That I, without stirring from my place, could arrive in a totally different world, in many worlds, all with a proper space, all with the same evidence of real existence, all full of life, full of sensations, fall of beauties and transports - this became for me a matter of simple experience. And no one only knowing it from hearsay can realize how different and how much more profound is the effect of actual experience.

In this conjunction the eternal error of the human phantasy in wishing to fly directly toward the perfect and complete revealed itself. All the defective work of the human imagination errs in wanting to make its creations too beautiful, in affording a soulless perfection, such as is manifested in human art by its decay after every period of bloom.

The insensible world is not full of pure loftiness and unmixed nobility. I do not constantly wander there in Elysian fields, absorbed in flowing conversations regarding important questions with spectres of noble stature and dignified bearing. As all reality, the reality of the beyond is unexpectedly fantastic, full of surprises and full of disillusions; but on the whole more stimulating and more beautiful than anything the imagination has pictured regarding it. And this is of supreme importance in the practice of our daily life - that the insensible world is in part our own creation, subject to our will, built up from the conclusions gathered in our day-life, with the faculties and powers which by practice and use we have in this same life made our own. To say for this reason that nothing new awaits us would be equal to the assertion that Beethoven had given nothing new to the world, because, after all, he only employed combinations of familiar sounds and tones. I again repeat - nothing in our actual day-life can equal the ecstasy of even a single awakening in the new sphere.