Nightmare Tales

by H. P. Blavatsky

One day the old captain was narrating to us the various superstitions to which sailors were addicted; a pompous English missionary remarked that Fielding had declared long ago that “superstition renders a man a fool,”—after which he hesitated for an instant, and abruptly stopped. I had not taken any part in the general conversation; but no sooner had the reverend speaker relieved himself of the quotation, than I saw in that halo of vibrating light, which I now noticed almost constantly over every human head on the steamer, the words of Fielding’s next proposition—“and scepticism makes him mad.”

I had heard and read of the claims of those who pretend to seership, that they often see the thoughts of people traced in the aura of those present. Whatever “aura” may mean with others, I had now a personal experience of the truth of the claim, and felt sufficiently disgusted with the discovery! I—a clairvoyant! a new horror added to my life, an absurd and ridiculous gift developed, which I shall have to conceal from all, feeling ashamed of it as if it were a case of leprosy. At this moment my hatred to the Yamabooshi, and even to my venerable old friend, the Bonze, knew no bounds. The former had evidently by his manipulations over me while I was lying unconscious, touched some unknown physiological spring in my brain, and by loosing it had called forth a faculty generally hidden in the human constitution; and it was the Japanese priest who had introduced the wretch into my house!

But my anger and my curses were alike useless, and could be of no avail. Moreover, we were already in European waters, and in a few more days we should be at Hamburg. Then would my doubts and fears be set at rest, and I should find, to my intense relief, that although clairvoyance, as regards the reading of human thoughts on the spot, may have some truth in it, the discernment of such events at a distance, as I had dreamed of, was an impossibility for human faculties. Notwithstanding all my reasoning, however, my heart was sick with fear, and full of the blackest presentiments; I felt that my doom was closing. I suffered terribly, my nervous and mental prostration becoming intensified day by day.

The night before we entered port I had a dream.

I fancied I was dead. My body lay cold and stiff in its last sleep, whilst its dying consciousness, which still regarded itself as “I,” realizing the event, was preparing to meet in a few seconds its own extinction. It had been always my belief that as the brain preserved heat longer than any of the other organs, and was the last to cease its activity, the thought in it survived bodily death by several minutes. Therefore, I was not in the least surprised to find in my dream that while the frame had already crossed that awful gulf “no mortal e’er repassed,” its consciousness was still in the gray twilight, the first shadows of the great Mystery. Thus my Thought wrapped, as I believed, in the remnants, of its now fast retiring vitality, was watching with intense and eager curiosity the approaches of its own dissolution, i.e., of its annihilation. “I” was hastening to record my last impressions, lest the dark mantle of eternal oblivion should envelope me, before I had time to feel and enjoy, the great, the supreme triumph of learning that my life-long convictions were true, that death is a complete and absolute cessation of conscious being. Everything around me was getting darker with every moment. Huge gray shadows were moving before my vision, slowly at first, then with accelerated motion, until they commenced whirling around with an almost vertiginous rapidity. Then, as though that motion had taken place only for purposes of brewing darkness, the object once reached, it slackened its speed, and as the darkness became gradually transformed into intense blackness, it ceased altogether. There was nothing now within my immediate perceptions, but that fathomless black Space, as dark as pitch: to me it appeared as limitless and as silent as the shoreless Ocean of Eternity upon which Time, the progeny of man’s brain, is for ever gliding, but which it can never cross.

Dream is defined by Cato as “but the image of our hopes and fears.” Having never feared death when awake, I felt, in this dream of mine, calm and serene at the idea of my speedy end. In truth, I felt rather relieved at the thought—probably owing to my recent mental suffering—that the end of all, of doubt, of fear for those I loved, of suffering, and of every anxiety, was close at hand. The constant anguish that had been gnawing ceaselessly at my heavy, aching heart for many a long and weary month, had now become unbearable; and if as Seneca thinks, death is but “the ceasing to be what we were before,” it was better that I should die. The body is dead; “I,” its consciousness—that which is all that remains of me now, for a few moments longer—am preparing to follow. Mental perceptions will get weaker, more dim and hazy with every second of time, until the longed for oblivion envelopes me completely in its cold shroud. Sweet is the magic hand of Death, the great World-Comforter; profound and dreamless is sleep in its unyielding arms. Yea, verily, it is a welcome guest.... A calm and peaceful haven amidst the roaring billows of the Ocean of life, whose breakers lash in vain the rock-bound shores of Death. Happy the lonely bark that drifts into the still waters of its black gulf, after having been so long, so cruelly tossed about by the angry waves of sentient life. Moored in it for evermore, needing no longer either sail or rudder, my bark will now find rest. Welcome then, O Death, at this tempting price; and fare thee well, poor body, which, having neither sought it nor derived pleasure from it, I now readily give up!...

While uttering this death-chant to the prostrate form before me, I bent over, and examined it with curiosity. I felt the surrounding darkness oppressing me, weighing on me almost tangibly, and I fancied I found in it the approach of the Liberator I was welcoming. And yet ... how very strange! If real, final Death takes place in our consciousness; if after the bodily death, “I” and my conscious perceptions are one—how is it that these perceptions do not become weaker, why does my brain-action seem as vigorous as ever now ... that I am de facto dead?... Nor does the usual feeling of anxiety, the “heavy heart” so-called, decrease in intensity; nay, it even seems to become worse ... unspeakably so!... How long it takes for full oblivion to arrive!... Ah, here’s my body again!... Vanished out of sight for a second or two, it reappears before me once more.... How white and ghastly it looks! Yet ... its brain cannot be quite dead, since “I,” its consciousness, am still acting, since we two fancy that we still are, that we live and think, disconnected from our creator and its ideating cell.

Suddenly I felt a strong desire to see how much longer the progress of dissolution was likely to last, before it placed its last seal on the brain and rendered it inactive. I examined my brain in its cranial cavity, through the (to me) entirely transparent walls and roof of the skull, and even touched the brain-matter.... How, or with whose hands, I am now unable to say; but the impression of the slimy, intensely cold matter produced a very strong impression on me, in that dream. To my great dismay, I found that the blood having entirely congealed and the brain-tissues having themselves undergone a change that would no longer permit any molecular action, it became impossible for me to account for the phenomena now taking place with myself. Here was I,—or my consciousness, which is all one—standing apparently entirely disconnected from my brain which could no longer function.... But I had no time left for reflection. A new and most extraordinary change in my perceptions had taken place and now engrossed my whole attention.... What does this signify?...

The same darkness was around me as before, a black, impenetrable space, extending in every direction. Only now, right before me, in whatever direction I was looking, moving with me which way soever I moved, there was a gigantic round clock; a disk, whose large white face shone ominously on the ebony-black background. As I looked at its huge dial, and at the pendulum moving to and fro regularly and slowly in Space, as if its swinging meant to divide eternity, I saw its needles pointing to seven minutes past five. “The hour at which my torture had commenced at Kioto!” I had barely found time to think of the coincidence, when, to my unutterable horror, I felt myself going through the same, the identical, process that I had been made to experience on that memorable and fatal day. I swam underground, dashing swiftly through the earth; I found myself once more in the pauper’s grave and recognized my brother-in-law in the mangled remains; I witnessed his terrible death; entered my sister’s house; followed her agony, and saw her go mad. I went over the same scenes without missing a single detail of them. But, alas! I was no longer iron-bound in the calm indifference that had then been mine, and which in that first vision had left me as unfeeling to my great misfortune as if I had been a heartless thing of rock. My mental tortures were now becoming beyond description and well-nigh unbearable. Even the settled despair, the never ceasing anxiety I was constantly experiencing when awake, had become now, in my dream and in the face of this repetition of visions and events, as an hour of darkened sunlight compared to a deadly cyclone. Oh! how I suffered in this wealth and pomp of infernal horrors, to which the conviction of the survival of man’s consciousness after death—for in that dream I firmly believed that my body was dead—added the most terrifying of all!

The relative relief I felt, when, after going over the last scene, I saw once more the great white face of the dial before me was not of long duration. The long, arrow-shaped needle was pointing on the colossal disk at—seven minutes and a-half past five o’clock. But, before I had time to well realize the change, the needle moved slowly backwards, stopped at precisely the seventh minute, and—O cursed fate!... I found myself driven into a repetition of the same series over again! Once more I swam underground, and saw, and heard, and suffered every torture that hell can provide; I passed through every mental anguish known to man or fiend. I returned to see the fatal dial and its needle—after what appeared to me an eternity—moved, as before, only half a minute forward. I beheld it, with renewed terror, moving back again, and felt myself propelled forward anew. And so it went on, and on, and on, time after time, in what seemed to me an endless succession, a series which never had any beginning, nor would it ever have an end....