Using dream symbols to interpret the world

 In 1814, Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert (1780-1860), a German physician and naturalist, published a most interesting book on The Symbolism of Dreams at a time when Napoleon was still campaigning across Europe. Schubert suggested that in dreams “the soul seems to speak an altogether different language than it usually does” a language resembling poetry than that he also sometimes characterized as “hieroglyphic”. If we can only remain conscious of what happens inside the dreamspace, we don’t have to learn the language of dreams, because it is the soul’s own language.

He speculated that dreaming may be “the true state of waking”, when we are in contact with our eternal nature". His propositions do not translate readily into English, but here is one worth puzzling over:

The events in our lives seem to be joined like the pictures in the dream; in other words, the series of events that have occurred and are occurring inside and outside of us, the inner principle of which we remain unaware, speaks the same language as our soul in a dream. Therefore, as soon as our mind speaks in dream language, it is able to make combinations that would not occur to us when awake; it cleverly combines the today with the yesterday, the fate of distant years in the future with the past; and when the future occurs we see that it was frequently accurately predicted. Dreams are a way of reckoning and combining that you and I do not understand; a higher kind of algebra, briefer and easier than ours, which only the hidden poet knows how to manipulate in his mind.[my italics][1]

Schubert is telling us (as I read him) that instead of trying to interpret dream symbols according to everyday assumptions, we should use the symbolic language of dreams to interpret the events and circumstances of everyday life. It’s a reasoned version of something I have long expressed like this: We need to take dreams more literally and waking life more symbolically.

Contemporaries remarked or mocked his childlike air of wonder and innocence. The acerbic Clemens Brentano said he had the manner of a chick that has just come out of its shell and is gaping dumbfounded at the light of day. At 18, when he became a medical student, he announced, “I see everywhere a great force that operates everywhere in things great and small.”

He published Die Symbolik des Traumes after a six year gap in his published work, the longest gap in a life in which he was often regarded as a writing machine. His many other works included a vast atlas of natural history, painstakingly illustrated by himself, and a 1,700 page autobiography. The catalyst for the dream book was a wine merchant from Bamberg, C.F.Kunz, who joined E.T.A. Hoffmann in drinking binges at the Hotel Wilde Rose  and became his self-invented publisher.

Over a few bottles, Kunz  proposed to Schubert that he should be his publisher. On what subject? Schubert, who had never read a book on dreams, surprised himself by proposing “a key to dreams”. A dream key it will be, said Kunz. Schubert assumed this conversation was just party banter but the wine merchant held him to his announcement and next winter he wrote the book. 

Schubert was fast and sloppy in writing about dreams, with brusque transitions, and he could not overcome his desire to show off his encyclopedic knowledge of medicine, physiology, botany and philology – and something of his esoteric studies (Saint-Martin, Boehme, Swedenborg) conducted under the mentorship of the mystical baker Mathias Burger.

Nonetheless, a leading scholar of the German Romantics declared that Schubert's book is “the most original of all the theoretical works devoted to the Romantic myth of the dream” [2]

The Symbolism of Dreams starts briskly: 

In dreams and already in the state of delirium that precedes sleep, the soul seems to speak a quite different language than the ordinary one. Certain objects from nature, certain properties of things suddenly represent people and, inversely, a certain quality or action presents itself in the guise of a person. [3] 

Ideas follow a different logic in dreams, not an inferior one, but “a more direct way of the spirit” An image may say in moments what it would take hours to try to express in words. Dreams speak a different language, the language of symbols. We have access to a universal hieroglyphic picture book.

Soul speaks a different language in dreams, one better suited to its nature.

Dreams stem from “the poet hidden in us” and their language is poetic and metaphorical. 

The seeds of the future, dormant in ordinary life, reveal themselves in relaxed states “through presentiment, through dreams, the phenomena of sympathy and animal magnetism.” 

The language of dreams is “infinitely faster, more expressive and expansive, less subject to progression through time” and it is “innate”. It does not have to be learned: the soul speaks it as soon as it escapes the limits of the body. 

 

1. Quoted in Albert Béguin, L’Ame Romantique et le Rêve: Essai sur le Romantisme Allemand et la Poésie Française. (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1960) p.106.
2. ibid p.107
3. ibid p.108
4. ibid.

Illustration of tulips, lilies and fritillaria from Schubert's Naturgeschichte des Pflanzenreichs (Natural History of the Plant Kingdom).