The Dream Hotel
I find myself in dream hotels several times a week. Sometimes I have trouble finding my room or getting back to the hotel from a walk in a city. Often I am leading a workshop or attending a meeting or dinner, engaging with many people. Sometimes, for reasons I don't yet understand, I am staying in one hotel while renting a room in another. The hotels are typically well-appointed, even luxurious, and I often have a suite.
I am frequently able to identify the location (typically in Europe) but these are not hotels where I have stayed or am likely to stay in the future.
I ask myself: what is a hotel? For me, it is a generally comfortable lodging for a traveler. Dreaming is often traveling and I am usually content to track the excursions of my traveling self in alternate realities while my body is at home. From a larger perspective, in this life we are in temporary lodgings, coming from the soul's home in a previous existence, on our way to the soul's home in the next world. We are passing through.
Dream Bodies
I am endlessly fascinated by accounts of experiences in the
subtle body, a term that came into the English language through the Cambridge
Platonists, notably Ralph Cudworth, in the 17th century. Other names for it
from the older Neoplatonist tradition include the astral body, the shining
body, the imaginal body, the soul vehicle, the soul garment.
I am generally content to call it the dreambody. I know, through long experience and observation, that when we go dreaming we may leave the physical body quite effortlessly and travel in another vehicle. When I go looking for visual portrayals of travel in the subtle body, I'm not generally impressed. You can easily find pictures of soul leaving the body at the moment of death - Blake's illustration to a poem is one of the best - but not much that convincingly portrays the operations of consciousness in a second body in life.
Father Arsenio Boca, the Romanian Orthodox mystic, painted a few; I saw them in a monastery in his home country. The illustrations in Hereward Carrington's old book on astral projection show a second body floating above the body on the bed, linked by a silver cord that seems to run from the fontanel. The Marvel multiverse gave us a thrilling sequence in the first Doctor Strange movie in which Benedict Cumberbatch gets pushed out of his body, into a second one, by a Tibetan master.
Kupka's Dream Lovers
My favorite artistic portrayal of dreambodies is an early work by the great Czech artist František Kupka. He wrote in a notebook that creative people have "psychic films" running in their minds. He painted a screenshot from one of these films in "The Dream" (1909) which shows lovers joined in their subtle bodies while their physical bodies lie dreaming below. The painting is modest in size, rendered in oil on a cardboard square about one foot on each side. However, the implications are enormous, and speak of Kupka's abilities - honed through years of practice in various esoteric schools - to see beyond the veils of consensual reality.
Two nude figures, male and female, lie on the ground in a sleep-dream state. Their second bodies dominate the scene on the upper left, overlapping each other in a sensual, translucent embrace. Their colors and forms shift across a spectrum of blue, purple and green. On either side diagonal lines in blue and purple give the sense of upward movement. Kupka employs a kind of transparent light to spotlight the subtle bodies of the lovers. Rather than reflecting light like solid three-dimensional figures, the dreambodies are suffused with light.
It's perhaps not surprising to find that Kupka was inspired by his own dream of astral love. He wrote on the lower left corner:
Ma Chère Ninie, Voici ébauche le reve que J’ai eu-nous deux—Ton Franc.
“My dear Ninie, Here I sketch the dream that I had of the two of us—Yours, Franc.”
Ninie is Eugénie
Straub.They began living together in 1906 and married in 1910.
Kupka is best-known as a pioneer of abstract art. However, if you look over a retrospective of his whole career you find that he mastered many styles. From the lavish symbolism of early works through Cubist flourishes to spare Mondrian-like geometries. You see his love of color and form. You sense, perhaps, his fervent quest to render visible what is invisible to the ordinary senses, to pluck at the veils between the world of appearances and what lies beyond. He declared this cause in his manifesto Creation in the Plastic Arts, published in Prague in 1927:
Great art makes the invisible and intangible, purely and simply felt, a visible and tangible reality — a reality that is not a simple pictorial replica of the ideal mechanism common to everyone, but that has, as a created work, a soul and a life of its own, which imposes itself supremely on the viewer’s senses.
Images
1. Dream Check-in by RM with AI assistance
2. Out the Window by RM with AI assistance
3. “The Dream” by František Kupka (1909)
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