The Dream

Louise Bogan
'The Dream'

O God, in the dream the terrible horse began
To paw at the air, and make for me with his blows,
Fear kept for thirty-five years poured through his mane,
And retribution equally old, or nearly, breathed through his nose.

Coward complete, I lay and wept on the ground
When some strong creature appeared, and leapt for the rein.
Another woman, as I lay half in a swound
Leapt in the air, and clutched at the leather and chain.

Give him, she said, something of yours as a charm.
Throw him, she said, some poor thing you alone claim.
No, no, I cried, he hates me; he is out for harm,
And whether I yield or not, it is all the same.

But, like a lion in a legend, when I flung the glove
Pulled from my sweating, my cold right hand;
The terrible beast, that no one may understand,
Came to my side, and put down his head in love.

To Be Deceived and to Dream

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Sir Sidney Colvin, 5 vol (London: William Heinemann, 1924), V, p. 184 [‘To Edmund Grosse’, Dec. 1894]:

I do like to be deceived and to dream, but I have very little use for either watching or meditation.

Virgil Under the Pillow

Hildebert of Lovardin (1056-1133)

Quadam autem nocte, dum fatigatis artubus modico sopore vir Dei consuleret, videre visus est decubantium sub capite suo serpentium multitudinem, caeteraque diversi generis reptilia, quibus ille perturbatus, somnum continuare non poterat. Dehinc amoto pulvinari, librum Maronis reperit, eoque projecto, somnum duxit tranquillum. Apta rei visio, cum nihil aliud quam quaedam venena sint fabulae poetarum.

What is more, one night, as the man of God attended to his wearied limbs by sleeping a little, he seemed to see a multitude of snakes lying under his head, as well as other reptiles of various sorts. Distressed by them, he was unable to continue sleeping. Then, after removing his pillow, he found a book of Virgil’s poetry. Upon tossing it aside, he slept peacefully. The vision is well suited to the matter, since the inventions of the poets are nothing if not venomous.

Vita Sancti Hugonis, 18 in Patrologia Latina, vol. 159, col. 872A-B. Cited in The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years, ed. by Jan M. Ziolkowski & Michael C.J. Putnam (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 897. Jan M. Ziolkowski’s translation.

Thoughts and Dreams

 אין מראין לו לאדם אלא מהרהורי ליבו
 
A person is only shown [in a dream] what is suggested by his thoughts.

Babylonian Talmud, Berakoth 55b My Translation.

The Oniric Domain

    Confined from early childhood in a world that almost everything he ever hears or reads will tell him is the one and only real world and that, as almost no one, on the contrary, will point to him, is a prison, man—l’homme moyen sensuel—bound hand and foot not only by those economic chains of whose existence he is becoming every more and more aware, but also by chains of second-hand and second-rate ideas, the preconceptions and prejudices that help to bind together the system known (ironically, as some think) by the name of ‘civilisation’, is for ever barred except in sleep from that other plane of existence where stones fall upwards and the sun shines by night, if it chooses, and where even the trees talk freely with the statues that have come down forever from their pedestals—a world to which entrance has generally been supposed, up till now, to be the sole privilege of poets and other madmen. For it is undeniably true that the oniric domain is still regarded in very much the same way as was the erotic domain during the Victorian era. That the dream is useless, as escape from reality, the dreamer a self-indulgent and lazy person, is the accepted view of an overwhelming majority. How, then, can man reconcile himself to the fact that he spends more than a third of his life on earth in sleep, and that he spends the whole time of his sleeping in a world that his conscious mind so despises?

David Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism (London: Enitharmon Press, 2003; 1935), p. 23.

Bookshop Scent

I remember how in 1941 I spent a rather guilty night of security in Berkhamsted away from the fly-bombs and the fire-watching with my brother Hugh. Asleep in the Swan Inn I dreamt of the W.H. Smith bookshop down the High Street from which I had stolen The Railway Magazine all those years ago, and I smelt the individual smell of the shop which was like the smell of no other Smith’s that I have ever known. In my dream I found a book for which I had long been searching on a particular shelf, and so in the morning, before I had breakfast, I walked down the street to see whether my dream might prove true. I was disappointed, the book was not there, but what I noticed at once on entering the shop was that the familiar smell had gone, and without the smell the shop was not the same. I inquired after the manager whom I remembered well: he had died the year before, and I suppose the new manager had changed whatever was the source of the smell which had so long haunted my imagination.

Graham Greene, A Sort of Life (London: Slightly Foxed, 2010; 1971), p. 81.