I am not so affected by dreams that can be explained. The vast, ghostly panorama that De Quincey so eloquently describes, with its contending hosts, its hither and thither passion, its impending salvation or doom, has, like the celebrated overture to Tannhäuser, a logical, and even a profound moral significance. That dream is the astral setting of a battle which is taking place on the stage of life; it is the countelpart of that conflict which is ceaseless in the waking consciousness of man; it belongs to reason and reality--the reason and reality we are familiar with as inhabitants of the earth.

But there stalks abroad an unreason and an unreality in this hinterland of subjective activities which is the country of the exiled soul. Not all the subtleties of literature could impart even a faint reflection of what happens when, for some reason, the drug is withheld, and the ego leaps out of time into eternity, like a planet that has lost its sun. Then follows the night of a thousand dreams.

It is as if all the film dramas that have been or ever will be created were being shown simultaneously on the same screen; as if all the gramophones in the world were operating together, and the mind had a detailed sense of every vocal particular, and a general conception of the stupendous whole. Fragments torn out of superhuman dramas, flashes of sublime poetry, spectacles unsurpassable...

And through it all the soul voyages on its own individual adventures, exploring endless vistas of existence, encountering saints, savages, and slaves that are not of the world, gods and men of some remote universe.

Incidents? What incidents can be chosen from the passage of a million years? Somewhere in my mind lingers the sinuous grace of strange and wonderful dances to music of ineffable sweetness, in a sunbathed arena, with ascending tiers of enthusiastic life that was unlike human life. I was a stranger there, until across a drifting twilight came the gentle Presence, the adorable One, who knows me. She turned over the pages of my life, and read them, every one, to the last word. She whom I have sought in sweat and blood! My undiscovered affinity of earth! The sweetness that had made me thirst! The hidden shrine! The altar of my offering to God! The sister-spirit who would cleanse me of sin! Beloved; alas, Beloved!...

EDITOR'S NOTE

By modern standards perhaps a tad overwritten, but still... what's going on here? I've occasionally had dreams where two storylines went on at once, like superimposed film, but this seems extreme. And yet... do you think he's lying? People's dreamlives are wildly diverse. I've repeatedly run across dream accounts I judged fake or exaggerated, only to later find more dreams by that writer and learn they routinely dream like that; indeed they're often unaware others don't. I suspect some temporal prejudice, too: those quaint old-fashioned people couldn't possibly dream something more sophisticated than us clever moderns!

Such chaos-dreams are rare in the World Dream Bank--but could it be selection bias?

Some specifics come through the chaos. That alien dance performance (I want tickets!) And then his Jungian anima shows up, and he gets overexcited and wakes, quite like any modern lucid dreamer trying to stay in REM. And then poses, in century-old language, a question we still ask: did his brain generate this chaos while cleaning up for the night? Or is it psychological or spiritual problem-solving; does the dream have meaning?

Noise or signal?

SOURCE: The New World of Dreams, Ralph Woods & Herbert Greenhouse, eds., 1974; p.100

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