Frederik van Eeden, the Dutch physician and novelist who brought the term "lucid dream" into currency through a report of his own experiences to the Society for Psychical Resaerch in 1913, gave this account of how he determined that a dream encounter with the departed was for real:"I saw Prof. van't Hoff, the famous Dutch chemist . . . .I went up to him, knowing very well that he was dead, and continued my inquiry about our condition after death....I asked first why we, lacking our organs of sense, could arrive at any certainty that the person to whom we were talking was really that person and not a subjective illusion.
"Then van't Hoff said: 'Just as in common life; by a general impression.'
"'Yet,' I said, 'in common life there is stability of observation and there is consolidation by repeated observation.'
"'Here also,' said van't Hoff. 'And the sensation of certainty is the same.'
"Then I had indeed a very strong feeling of certitude that it was really van't Hoff with whom I talked and no subjective illusion." [1]
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.
Source: Frederik van Eeden “A Study of Dreams” in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 26, 1913
Art: Robert Moss, "Bridegroom of Dreans". Inspired by van Eeden's novel of lucid dreaming and astral travel, The Bride of Dreams.
