In Mr. A.’s case, however, some persons might think that the proof of an independent intelligence went much further than this; for his hand wrote anagrams which his waking brain took an hour or more to unriddle. And certainly there could hardly be a clearer proof that the answers did not pass through the writer’s primary consciousness; that they proceeded, if from himself at all, from a secondary self such as I have been describing. But further than this we surely need not go. The answers contain no unknown facts, no new materials, and there seems no reason à priori why the dream-self should not puzzle the waking self; why its fantastic combinations of old elements of memory should not need some pains to unravel. I may perhaps be permitted to quote in illustration a recent dream of my own, to which I doubt not that some of my readers can supply parallel instances. I dreamt that I saw written in gold on a chapel wall some Greek hexameters, which, I was told, were the work of an eminent living scholar. I gazed at them with much respect, but dim comprehension, and succeeded in carrying back into waking memory the bulk of one line:—ὁ μὲν κατὰ γᾶν θαλερὸν κύσε δακνόμενον πῦρ. On waking, it needed some little thought to show me that κατὰ γᾶν was a solecism for ὑπὸ γᾶν, revived from early boyhood, and that the line meant: “He indeed beneath the earth embraced the ever-burning, biting fire.” Further reflection reminded me that I had lately been asked to apply to the Professor in question for an inscription to be placed over the tomb of a common acquaintance. The matter had dropped, and I had not thought of it again. But here, I cannot doubt, was my inner self’s prevision of that unwritten epitaph; although the drift of it certainly showed less tact and fine feeling than my scholarly friend would have exhibited on such an occasion.
Now just in this same way, as it seems to me, Mr. A.’s inner self retraced the familiar path of one of his childish amusements, and mystified the waking man with the puzzles of the boy. It may be that the unconscious self moves more readily than the conscious along these old-established and stable mnemonic tracks, that we constantly retrace our early memories without knowing it, and that when some recollection seems to have left us it has only passed into a storehouse from which we can no longer summon it at will.
But we have not yet done with Mr. A.’s experiences. Yielding to the suggestion that these anagrams were the work of some intelligence without him, he placed himself in the mental attitude of colloquy with some unknown being. Note the result:
“Who art thou? Clelia. Thou art a woman? Yes. Hast thou ever lived upon the earth? No. Wilt thou? Yes. When? Six years. Wherefore dost thou speak with me? E if Clelia el.”
There is a disappointing ambiguity about this last very simple anagram, which may mean “I Clelia feel,” or, “I Clelia flee.”
But mark what has happened. Mr. A. has created and is talking to a personage in his own dream. In other words, his secondary self has produced in his primary self the illusion that there is a separate intelligence at work; and this illusion of the primary self reacts on the secondary, as the words which we whisper back to the muttering dreamer influence the course of a dream which we cannot follow. The fact, therefore, of Clelia’s apparent personality and unexpected rejoinders do not so much as suggest any need to look outside Mr. A’s mind for her origin. The figures in our own ordinary dreams say things which startle and even shock us; nay, these shadows sometimes even defy our attempts at analyzing them away. On the rare occasions, so brief and precious, when one dreams and knows it is a dream, I always endeavor to get at my dream-personages and test their independence of character by a few suitable inquiries. Unfortunately they invariably vanish under my perhaps too hasty interrogation. But a shrewd Northumbrian lately told me the following dream, unique in his experience, and over which he had often pondered.
“I was walking in my dream,” he said, “in a Newcastle street, when suddenly I knew so clearly that it was a dream, that I thought I would find out what the folk in my dream thought of themselves. I saw three foundrymen sitting at a yard door. I went up and said to all three: ‘Are you conscious of a real objective existence?’ Two of the men stared and laughed at me. But the man in the middle stretched out his two hands to his two mates and said, ‘Feel that,’ They said, ‘We do feel you,’ Then he held out his hand to me, and I told him that I felt it solid and warm; then he said: ‘Well, sir, my mates feel that I am a real man of flesh and blood, and you feel it, and I feel it. What more would you have?’ Now I had not formed any notion of what this man was going to say. And I could not answer him, and I awoke.”
Now I take this self-assertive dream-foundry-man to be the exact analogue of Clelia. Let us now see whether anything of Clelia survived the excited hour which begat her.
“On the fourth day,” says Mr. A., “I began my questioning in the same exalted mood, but to my surprise did not get the same answer. ‘Wherefore,’ I asked, ‘dost thou speak with me?’ (The answer was a wavy line, denoting repetition, and meaning.—‘Wherefore dost thou speak with me?’) ‘Do I answer myself?’ Yes. ‘Is Clelia here?’ No. ‘Who is it, then, now here?’ Nobody. ‘Does Clelia exist?’ No. ‘With whom did I speak yesterday?’ No one. ‘Do souls exist in another world?’ Mb. ‘What does mb mean? ’May be.”
And this was all the revelation which our inquirer got. Some further anagrams were given, but Clelia came no more. Such indeed, on the view here set forth, was the natural conclusion. The dream passed through its stages, and faded at last away.