William James, Lost and Found in the Multiverse

 

William James, the greatest American philosopher and psychologist and a neighbor of mine in the Albany NY of an earlier time, coined the word “multiverse”, which he gave a hinge, rendering it as “multi-verse”. In  his chapter on “The Perception of Reality” volume 2 of his Principles of Psychology [1890] he outlines a “many worlds” theory in which he describes realities created by mind and belief, including the abstract world of scientific theory and the worlds of “tribal gods” and religion-based afterlives.

      In the Hibbert lectures published as A Pluralistic Universe, James argues for a “multi-verse” as follows:

 

Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational. The all-form allows of no taking up and dropping of connexions, for in the 'all' the parts are essentially and externally co-implicated. In the each-form, on the contrary, a thing may be connected by intermediate things, with a thing with which it has no immediate or essential connexion.
    If the each-form be the eternal form of reality no less than the form of temporal appearance, we still have a coherent world, and not an incarnate incoherence, as is charged by so many absolutists. Our 'multiverse' still makes a 'universe'; for every part, though it may not be in actual or immediate connexion, is nevertheless in some possible or mediate connexion with every other part, however remote. [1]      
    Things are 'with' one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything or dominates over everything [2]  

     God is not the absolute, but is Himself a part. . . . His functions can be taken as not wholly dissimilar to those of the other smaller parts — as similar to our functions, consequently, having an environment, being in time, and working out a history just like ourselves, He escapes from the foreignness from all that is human, of the static, timeless, perfect absolute [3]. 

 

While wrestling with this language - not James' most euphonious -  I came again across this statement in The Varieties of Religious Experience: "The founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine." [4] 

    That “direct personal communion" has been accomplished through dreams and visions and interior dialogue and observation of signs and marvels in the natural world, all facets of dreaming as we understand it in the dream school. James reminds us that religion without dreaming is divorced from its very origins. 

     In The Will to Believe, James offered two insights that are highly relevant to the dismissal of dreaming, and the conditions for useful study of it: "As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use." [5] 

 

And then:

 

The most useful investigator, because the most sensitive observer, is always he whose eager interest in one side of the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become deceived. [6]

In a letter to Henry Rankin on June 16, 1901, he put it this way: ?"The mother sea and fountainhead of all religions lie in the mystical experiences of the individual, taking the word mystical in a very wide sense. All theologies and ecclesiasticisms are secondary growths superimposed."  Borrowing from his friend, the great British psychic researcher and scholar, F.W.H. Myers,  James explained that "mystical consciousness" is related to the existence of an "extended subliminal self, with a thin partition through which messages make irruption."
     For most of us, it is through dreams that the subliminal self most frequently irrupts through that "thin partition" into everyday awareness. James says this about dream reality in Principles of Psychology:

 

The world of dreams is our real world whilst we are sleeping, because our attention then lapses from the sensible world. Conversely, when we wake the attention usually lapses from the dream-world and that becomes unreal. But if a dream haunts us and compels our attention during the day it is very apt to remain figuring in our consciousness as a sort of sub-universe alongside of the waking world.
    Most people have probably had dreams which it is hard to imagine not to have been glimpses into an actually existing region of being, perhaps a corner of the 'spiritual world. 'And dreams have accordingly in all ages been regarded as revelations, and have played a large part in furnishing forth mythologies and creating themes for faith to lay hold upon. The 'larger universe,' here, which helps us to believe both in the dream and in the waking reality which is its immediate reductive, is the total universe, of Nature plus the Super-natural.
    The dream holds true, namely, in one half of that universe ; the waking perceptions in the other half. Even to-day dream-objects figure among the realities in which some ' psychic-researchers' are seeking to rouse our belief. All our theories, not only those about the supernatural, but our philosophic and scientific theories as well, are like our dreams in rousing such different degrees of belief in different minds. [7]

Dwell with that last statement for a moment.  The dream "holds true" in half the "total" universe, and is our way to access and experience this reality. If William James is correct, if we have divorced ourselves from dreaming, we are only halflings, only half present in the universe.
    It does not seem that William James kept a regular journal of dreams, but he did record disturbing dreams from his nights in  San Franciso in 1906 that led him to ask further questions about reality in the mutiverse. He called what happened “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. To compound the strangeness, he wrote that the nocturnal adventures that had shaken him to his core were "dreams I could not remember myself to have had”.
     On the night of February 12, 1906,  James slept 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 up 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 troubling.
    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.” [emphasis added]
     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 used the term "multiverse" but did not make the full connection with dreaming, which may be our best way to observe and understand the many worlds on a human level. In serial dreams, in which we find ourselves in parallel realities over time, we learn that we may be living continuous lives elsewhere. Through nested and multiple interactive dreams we awaken to the probability that we and our dream doubles are active in many realities at the same time. Growing the practice of conscious, volitional dreaming is the royal road to fulfilling James' aim of expanding the "margins" of  consciousness  and our understanding of the nature of reality. He stood on the cusp but held back. 

References

1. William James, A Pluralistic Universe. London: Lomgmans, Green, 1909. p. 324

2. ibid., p. 321.

3. ibid, p. 318.

4.  William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. London: Longmans, Green 1952, p.31.

5. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. London: Longmans, Green, 1897.

6. ibid, p. 21

7.  William James, Principles of Psychology.  New York: Henry Holt, 1890 vol. 2, p.294n. 

8. 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.

Drawing of William James on Willett Street by Robert Moss