He called it “the most peculiar experience of my whole life”. He said that it put him in a state of mental confusion that made his teeth chatter. The voice is that of William James, the renowned American psychologist, philosopher and psychic researcher. He was talking about dreams that had shaken him to his core, "dreams I could not remember myself to have had”.
On February 12, 1906, James was in San Francisco, in a bed at
Stanford University. He woke at breakfast time from “a quiet dream of some sort”.
While gathering his thoughts, his memory of the dream “seemed suddenly to get
mixed np with reminiscences of a dream of an entirely different sort, which
seemed to telescope, as it were, into the first one, a dream very elaborate, of
lions, and tragic”. He decided that the lion dream must have been “a previous
dream of the same sleep”. However, he found the apparent mingling of two dreams
to be “something very queer, which I had never before experienced” – and deeply
disturbing.
The following night, he woke from heavy sleep in the
middle of a dream. Thinking about the dream he became confused by the irruption
of two more dreams into his memory. They “shuffled themselves abruptly in
between the parts of the first dream” and he could not grasp their origin.
“Whence come these dreams? I asked. They were close to
me, and fresh, as if I had just dreamed them; and yet they were far away from
the first dream.” He could not find a connection between them. One had a “cockney
atmosphere”, and “happened to someone in London”. The other two dreams had
American locales. In one, perhaps the one from which he wakened, he was trying
on a coat. The other was “a sort of nightmare and had to do with soldiers” Each
dream had completely different content and a distinct emotional charge. Yet as
they telescoped in and out of each other, James noted, “I seemed to myself to
have been their common dreamer, they seemed quite as distinctly not to have
been dreamed in succession, in that one sleep… I seemed thus to belong to three
different dream-systems at once, no one of which would connect itself either
with the others or with my waking life. I began to feel curiously confused and
scared, and tried to wake myself up wider, but I seemed already wide-awake.”
His emotional response was amazingly strong. “Presently
cold shivers of dread ran over me: am I getting into other people's dreams?”
Was this telepathy, or a descent into dementia and mental confusion, even
multiple personality disorder?
"Decidedly I was losing hold of my 'self,' and
making acquaintance with a quality of mental distress that I had never known
before, its nearest analogue being the sinking, giddying anxiety that one may
have when, in the woods, one discovers that one is really lost.”
Who is the dreamer? Whose are the dreams? He repeated
the question over and over, even in the published version of his notes. “Whose?
whose? WHOSE? Unless I can attach them, I am swept out to sea with no horizon
and no bond, getting lost. …My teeth chattered at the thought.”
His experiences increased his empathy for those
diagnosed with dementia, Verwirrtheit [mental confusion] or suffering “invasions
of secondary personality”. “We regard them as simply curious; but what they
want in the awful drift of their being out of its customary self, is any
principle of steadiness to hold on to. We ought to assure them and reassure
them that we will stand by them, and recognize the true self in them to the
end.”
Desperate to explain what had happened to him on those
San Francisco nights, he played with the notion that it had something to do
with the hour of waking. On going to bed, he normally slept heavily until after
two. On the nights of multiple dreams, he had woken around midnight. He had
never remembered “midnight dreams" before. Was it possible that his mind was
playing catchup, bringing him dreams from midnights past that had escaped him
until now? The idea gave him relief. He had been scared to let himself return
to sleep and dreams. Now he lay down, fell asleep, and woke at seven with “a
curious, but not alarming, confusion between two dreams.”
As things settled, James continued to be haunted by
the shock of those San Francisco nights. “My confusion was foudroyante
[like a lightning bolt], a state of consciousness unique and unparalleled in my
64 years of the world's experience.”
He felt unable to rule out the possibility that his
multiple dreams were produced by “a telepathic entrance into someone else's
dreams” or “a doubling up of personality".
“I don't know now 'who' had those three dreams, or
which one 'I' first woke up from, so quickly did they substitute themselves
back and forth for each other, discontinuously…To this day I feel that those
extra dreams were dreamed in reality, but when, where, and by whom, I cannot
guess.”
It appears that James never settled his inquiry as to what had made his teeth chatter, though brilliantly equipped to do so. He made use of the term "multiverse" but it seems he did not apply it to his understanding of dreams: to the possibility that in nested and multiple interacting dreams we may be in multiple realities at the same time. Exploring what that means through direct experience is a royal road to fulfilling James' aim of expanding the "margins" of our fields of consciousness - and our understanding of the nature of the universe.
James kept a detailed record of his experiences in his
college bed in San Francisco on the nights of February 12-13, 1906 but it gives
only brief and vague impressions of the content of the dreams that appalled
him. He published most of these journal pages in an essay on the expansion of
the field of consciousness in a scholarly journal in 1910. See William James, “A Suggestion About Mysticism”
in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific
Methods Vol. 7, No. 4 (Feb. 17, 1910) 85-92.
Photo by RM
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