"The seventh type of dreams, which I call lucid dreams, seems to me the most interesting and worthy of the most careful observation and study. Of this type I experienced and wrote down 352 cases in the period between January 20, 1898, and December 26, 1912."In these lucid dreams the reintegration of the psychic functions is so complete that the sleeper remembers day-life and his own condition, reaches a state of perfect awareness, and is able to direct his attention, and to attempt different acts of free volition. Yet the sleep, as I am able confidently to state, is undisturbed, deep and refreshing."
- Frederik van Eeden “A Study of Dreams” in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 26, 1913
The dream explorer who coined the term lucid dreaming was a
dedicated soul journeyer. Dr. Frederik van Eeden (1860–1932) was a Dutch
writer, physician, and member of the British Society for Psychical Research
(SPR). In 1913, he gave a lecture to the SPR in which he reported “lucid
dreams” in which the dreamer retains the memory of his waking life, remained
conscious, and could carry out “different acts of free volition.” He observed
that the phenomenon of multiple consciousness and “double memory” - of both
waking and dream events - “leads almost unavoidably to the conception of a
dream-body.”
His first attempt to give full expression to what he had experienced took the
form of a novel which he titled The Bride of Dreams. He told the
SPR that "the fictitious form enabled me to deal freely with delicate
matters, and had also the advantage that it expressed rather unusual ideas in a
less aggressive way - esoterically, so to speak."
He had many interests: as a writer, he belonged to a
prominent Dutch literary group and found an international audience with his
novel Hedwig’s Journey in 1900; as a physician, he worked on a cure for TB; as
a pacifist he founded a society called Walden; as a reformer he worked for
compensation for dismissed strikers; as a spiritual seeker, he looked East, and
back to Western mystics like Boehme before immuring himself in the Catholic
church in 1922 (which may have been foreshadowed by all the tortured
theological musings in Bride of Dreams and his belief in demons, shared with the
SPR), He took on Freud, rejecting his
theory of dreams as wish fulfilment. He had two wives, Martha (divorced
in 1907) and Geertruida, with him till his death. Two children from each
marriage.
Van Eeden’s autobiographical novel The Bride of Dreams, features
a protagonist and narrator dressed up rather unconvincingly as an Italian aristocrat,
Count Muralto. The book is tedious and talky
– and occasionally seemingly antisemitic - until we get to chapter 12 when the
Count begins to discuss his dream life. The chapter starts with an account of
detailed dream observation of a tree he is sure he could not invent, the
incident van Eeden mentioned in his paper for the SPR. There are dream encounters
with the dead, including a reunion with the protagonist’s father, who shows the
love and compassion lacking in life, when the father tried to kill them both on
a boat and died cursing his son.
We learn about the Count’s experiments in becoming conscious
inside his dreams, and sustaining consciousness as he passes between waking and
dream states. There is convincing material on how the dream body, which has its
own sensorium, experiences pleasure and pain. In a lurch back to medievalism, the
narrator blames “demons” for terrors and confusion, including the phenomenon of
false awakening. The book trumpets the idea that out truest life, and clearest
knowing, may be attained in dreams. "
Here is his account of the blossoming tree:
one night while dreaming of a
blossoming orchard in Italy, I succeeded in observing with thorough
consciousness. I saw the branches as they crossed one another, and the
festoons of vines stretching from tree to tree, whilst I soared through, a
few yards from the ground, with a pale blue sky above me. And while
observing yet more closely I pondered how it was possible to reproduce so exactly
and minutely in a vision obviously emanating from myself and which I had myself
created, the apparent motions of these myriad crossing twigs and the
confusion of the young foliage. And in my dream, and realizing that I was
dreaming, I came to the conclusion that this vision must be a reality, an
objective reality as the philosophers of reason would say, because to me
- the observer - it manifested a distinctly personal existence. As I
soared by, the twigs described their apparent motions exactly as I had
observed by day, and how should I, who could not even draw a tree, be able
to create these extraordinarily compiled moving images?
He found himself “thoroughly wide awake in the midst
of… deep sound sleep”
As the Count, he expresses his desire to master continuity of consciousness and double
his life
In my first elation I hoped that I
might sometime reach the point where I could pass from waking to sleeping
without loss of conscious- ness, and night after night contemplate the
dream-sphere with all the calmness of day - thus doubling my entire life.
As we follow the Count’s experiments in lucid dreaming, we
see him planning destination travel:
In order actively to carry out a thing in the dream world, I must resolve upon it betimes and definitely determine upon the plan. During the actual dream the time is usually too short, the incidents pass too fleetingly. Sometimes I soar on in swift flight so that everything rushes by me without my being able to delay the pace. It is usually after one of these happy dreams with full consciousness, that I plan out, that very morning before getting up, what I shall do the next time in my dream. And then, every evening before falling asleep, it is once more distinctly formulated and stamped upon the memory
He finds himself leading a double life, with the certainty that his dream life is no less real than his waking one. "I led for many years a double life, in which the incidents of the day did not seem more important to me than the observations of the night."
He is fully aware that he has a subtle body, or dream body: "I knew now that I had another body, beside the ordinary one, an animæ corpus, with a proper world of perception; and this knowledge rested upon equally good foundations as every one's knowledge concerning the existence of his ordinary body."
He can travel to many worlds without moving his body:
That I, without stirring from my
place, could arrive in a totally different world, in many worlds, all with
a proper space, all with the same evidence of real existence, all full of
life, full of sensations, fall of beauties and transports - this became
for me a matter of simple experience. And no one only knowing it from
hearsay can realize how different and how much more profound is the effect
of actual experience.
He asks, how much of all this is his own creation? and gives an interesting response:
the insensible world is in part our own creation, subject to our will, built up from the conclusions gathered in our day-life, with the faculties and powers which by practice and use we have in this same life made our own.
Everything is the product of imagination; the sun and the stars are also works of God’s imagination.
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