When I was a boy, between the ages of seven or eight and of eleven, I had a series of very curious dreams. I say a series, for, though the same dream never occurred twice, the same scenes and people did occur in all. Some features of these dreams were very strange, and to this day I can think of no 'orthodox' explanation of them.

In these dreams I was not a boy, but a grown man; I spoke and thought a language which was neither English, French nor German, the only languages I knew, but some tongue I have never been able to identify--though I have the strong suspicion that I have identified its script, utterly unknown to me at any time. In the dreams I knew not one word of English.

Further, I had no knowledge of any person, place or event with which I was actually acquainted in 'real' life. I had different parents and different friends--all, like myself, of dark complexion and dressed in un-European clothes.

The locus of the dreams was always the same region, but by no means the same part of that region. It was a country of very high, sharp, and almost snowless mountains, of terribly desolate, stony valleys, of elevated and wind-swept plateaux. Somewhere in the midst of these mountains was a city, towards which I was frequently journeying on foot, but which I never remembered to have reached. The landscape was absolutely consistent, and as fixed and material as the landscape of the Lake District: it had none of the blurred edges or suddenly shifting outlines so common to dream landscapes.

I did not recall these things as things I had dreamed, but as places and persons whom I had known. I remembered having been the dream-person, not having dreamed about him. It was then that the peculiar script of the dream-language came clearly again before me and that I recognized it. It is a genuine human script and no mere dream-invention; but it is a script and a language of which neither I nor anyone with whom I have ever spoken has the faintest knowledge. When I saw it again under the drug it had become to me also a foreign and unknown tongue, though in the dream-series it had been my mother tongue.

If I believed in reincarnation, and at times I am more than tempted to, I could hazard an explanation; as it is I cannot even guess at it--not even with the help of Freud and his kind.

EDITOR'S COMMENTS

• "Recurring" dreams that aren't: This rare type I call episodic, or "installment" dreams. True recurrent dreams happen with little or no variation; episodic dreams have the same setting and characters, but different events. I call them rare, but everyone's experienced one such series: it's called "reality", which of course is episodic: broken by sleep and dreaming. But if your so-called "dreams" are equally coherent, what privileges one of your two realities over the other? What makes you sure your "waking" world isn't an episodic dream? De la Mare isn't the only writer to have episodics; so did Robert Louis Stevenson.
• Cannabis: De la Mare wasn't smoking pot; he ate pills of the resin--essentially, medical hashish--and not from common Cannabis sativa, but Cannabis indica. This was, he writes, "of somewhat dubious lawfulness", but not explicitly outlawed in England--yet.
• Other self: it's common to dream you're a kid again; less so for a kid to dream of an older self. Or, here, not-self. Not a gender-bent dream, but an age- and identity-bent dream.
• Language, script: "It is a genuine human script and no mere dream-invention; but it is a script and a language of which neither I nor anyone with whom I have ever spoken has the faintest knowledge." If no one knows it, how can he call it a genuine human script? Does he mean he's found samples of it, but no one can translate it? "I have the strong suspicion I have identified its script" sure implies that. But then why be so coy, why not just say "It looks like Linear B, or Rapa Nui" or whatever undeciphered script he thinks it is? Maddening.
• Rugged, dry, mostly snowless land: Armenia, Georgia, Central Asia? Heavy winter snows. Ethiopia? Mountainous, snowless, but not desolate. Yemen or inland Morocco fit the landscape best. All these do have non-Roman scripts... but known ones.
• Reincarnation: This isn't de la Mare's only dream in which he appeared to live another's life--or rather, die another's death, in Dying Once, Dying Twice.

SOURCE: Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe by Walter de la Mare, 1930: dream p.97; cannabis notes, 93-4 & 99. I added title to aid searches.

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