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II

SUPPRESSIONS AND SYMBOLISM IN DREAMLAND

BUT THE FANTASIES of dreamland go an immeasurable way beyond what is now conceivable and practical.

The subliminal self is never straightforward. It awakens us, for example, to sex and the social reactions of adolescence in the queerest, most roundabout way. There are sound biological explanations why our minds should work in this fashion, but I cannot go into them now. The submerged intervener is cryptic and oracular; it hints and perplexes. Symbols become persons and persons symbols; individuals, animals, institutions, amalgamate and divide and change into one another.

Religions are such stuff as dreams are made of. The Athanasian Creed is severely logical in dreamland, Isis is transfigured into Hathor, a cow, Quannon, the crescent moon and Murillo’s Queen of Heaven, and still the dream flows on. Osiris becomes his own son Horus, who becomes again Osiris and the Virgin Mother, in incessant rotation. This is the atmosphere of this uncontrollable Wonderland beyond the Turn, in which my accumulated loves and suppressions, disappointments and stresses, find release. But very plainly it is my personal needs that provide the substance of the stories with which my dreaming self now consoles and regales me.

In the past I do not recall dreams as a frequent factor in my existence, though some affected me very importantly. As a child I used to have a sort of geometrical nightmare as if a mad kaleidoscope charged down upon me, and this was accompanied by intense distress. I may have been very young then, because I cannot remember how I awakened or whether I conveyed my distress to anyone. Nor have I ever come upon a description of that dream as happening to any other child.

But I remember a considerable number of quite frightful dreams that came before my teens. I read precociously, and I was pursued implacably, to a screaming and weeping awakening, by the more alarming animals I read about. An uncle from the West Indies described some frightful spiders that scratched and crawled. I was then put to bed alone in the dark in the upstairs bedroom of a strange house, and I disgraced myself by screaming the house down.

I had horror dreams of torture and cruelty. One made me an atheist. My mother was a deeply religious woman, but she did her best to conceal the Devil from me; there were pictures in an old prayer-book showing hell well alight, but she obliterated these with stamp paper which I was only partially successful in removing, so that until I held the page up to the light, hell was a mere suspicion. And one day I read a description in an old number of CHAMBER’S JOURNAL of a man being broken on the wheel over a slow fire, and in my sleep it flared up into immeasurable disgust. By a mental leap which cut out all intermediaries, the dream artist made it clear that if indeed there was an all powerful God, then it was he and he alone who stood there conducting this torture. I woke and stared at the empty darkness. There was no alternative but madness, and sanity prevailed. God had gone out of my life. He was impossible.

From that time on, I began to invent and talk blasphemy. I do not like filth. Merely dirty stories disgust me, and when sexual jokes have an element of laughter in them almost always it is dishonouring and cruel laughter. But theology has always seemed to me an area for clean fun that should do no harm to any properly constituted person. Blasphemy may frighten unemancipated minds, but it is unbecoming that human beings should be governed by fear. From first to last I have invented a considerable amount of excellent blasphemy. ALL ABOARD FOR ARARAT is the last of a long series of drawings and writings, many of which have never seen and probably never will see the light of print. There must be lingering bits of belief in order to produce the relief of laughter, and such jests may fade out very rapidly at no very distant date.

Only a few other dreams stuck in my memory before I discovered the Happy Turning, and mostly they were absurd and misleading freaks of fantasy. I dreamt my mother was ill and in great distress and wrote off post haste to her. There was nothing at all the matter with her.

I must have had anxiety dreams when I was over-working, in which everything was at sixes and sevens, I must have had them because I devised a technique for dealing with them. Directly I woke up, I got up and dismissed them. I trained myself to make tea and set to work soberly in a dressing-gown, and soon everything fell back into its place and the disturbance succumbed to fatigue and natural sleepiness. My friend J. W. Dunne, who wrote AN EXPERIMENT WITH TIME, lost himself for a time in a Serial Universe and has come back a most delightful writer of fantastic tales, induced me to keep a notebook at my bed-head and jot down my dreams fresh and hot. I do not remember making a note. I just woke up, and whatever dreams may have been hanging about vanished unimportantly forthwith.

So my present resort to dreamland is a new experience. I am a happy explorer telling of a delightful world he has come upon, beyond expectation.