News from The Secret Commonwealth

 

In a book titled The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, Robert Kirk (1644-1692), a Gaelic scholar and Anglican vicar at Aberfoyle in Scotland,  describes a “secret way of correspondence” with the invisible world: a means of crossing between ordinary and nonordinary reality at will. Kirk subtitled his work “An Essay of the Nature and actions of the Subterranean and for the most part Invisible People, heretofore going by the names of Elves, Fauns and Fairies and the like.”

Subtle bodies The inhabitants of these realms are not disembodied. They have “light changeable bodies, like those called Astral, somewhat of the nature of a condensed cloud. They shape-shift and can make their “bodies of congealed air” appear and disappear at will.

Middle nature: The fairies are “of a middle nature betwixt man and Angel,” like the daimons of the ancient world. Kirk discusses rival opinions in his parish about whether the “good people” are spirits of the departed, clothed in their subtle bodies; “exuded forms of the man approaching death”; or “a numerous people by themselves.” He suggests that all these descriptions may be valid for different groups.

Doubles. Kirk reports that each of us has a double who is fully at home in the Otherworld. The old Scots Gaelic term for this double is coimimeadh (pronounced “coy-me-may”), which means “co-walker.” Kirk improvises a series of synonyms for the double, including: twin, companion, echo, “reflex-man,” and living picture. The double resembles the living person both before and after she or he dies. The double survives physical death, when the co-walker “goes at last to his own land.” When invited, the co-walker will make itself “known and familiar.” But most people are unaware that they have a double. Since it lives in a different element, it “neither can nor will easily converse” with the everyday waking mind.

As natural as fishing As a man of the Church, Kirk goes to great lengths to argue that there is nothing ungodly about “correspondence” with Otherworld beings, quoting reports of visionary experiences in the Bible. He also contends that it is as “natural” to encounter the inhabitants of the Otherworld as it is to go fishing; both involve moving into another element. Yeats brings this to poetic life in "The Song of Wandering Aengus", where a man fishing with a hazel rod catches a little silver trout that becomes a girl with apple-blossom in her hair.  

Kirk reassures us that we are dealing with “an invisible people, guardian over and careful of man,” whose “courteous endeavor” is to convince us of the reality of the spiritual world and of “a possible and harmless method of correspondence betwixt men and them, even in this life.” 

However, local legend has it that members of the Secret Commonwealth found the minister too mouthy about them and carried him away one summer evening when he was walking on a dun-shi, a fairy hill behind his house.  He was taken before his book was published. It remained for Sir Walter Scott to discover and publish it in 1815. The frontispiece is a watercolor drawing  hy Sir D.Y. Cameron depicting the Hill of the Faitries at Aberfoyle. Bailie Nicol Jarvie describes this hill and its legends in Rob Roy.

Kirk's successor as minister at Aberfoyle, the Rev. Dr. Grahame, in his Sketches of Picturesque Scenery, recounted that as Kirk was walking on the fairy hill, he sunk down in a swoon, which was taken for death. “After the ceremony of a seeming funeral,” Scott continued the story in Demonology and Witchcraft , “the form of the Rev. Robert Kirk appeared to a relation, and commanded him to go to Grahame of Duchray. ‘Say to Duchray, who is my cousin as well as your own, that I am not dead, but a captive in Fairyland; and only one chance remains for my liberation. When the posthumous child, of which my wife has been delivered since my disappearance, shall be brought to baptism, I will appear in the room, when, if Duchray shall throw over my head the knife or dirk which he holds in his hand, I may be restored to society; but if this is neglected, I am lost for ever." According to this story, Kirk did appear at the christening, and “was visibly seen;” but Duchray was so gobsmacked that he did not throw his dirk  and Kirk went away again.

Kirk lived in a world not yet "dispeopled of its dreams" as Andrew Lang wrote in his introduction to a 1893 edition of The Secret Commonwealth. Lang proceeded to discuss experiences of the co-walker:  "All things universally have their types, their reflex: a man’s type, or reflex, or ' co-walker' may be seen at a distance from or near him during his life—nay, may be seen after his death. The gifted man of second sight can tell the substantial figure from the airy counterpart."

Lang was especially interested in the kind of double that goes ahead of you for which the Norwegians use the term vardøger, who "was often seen of old to enter a House, by which the people knew that the Person of that Likeness was to visit them in a few days....It may have occurred to most of us to meet a person in the street whom we took for an acquaintance. It is not he, but we meet the real man a few paces farther on. Thus a distinguished officer, at home on leave, met a friend, as he tells me, in Piccadilly. The other passed without notice: the officer hesitated about following him, did not, and in some fifty yards met his man. There is probably no more in this than resemblance and coincidence, but this is the kind of thing which was worked by the Highlanders into their metaphysics."

Illustration: Robert Kirk Goes Away. RM+AI

Dreams and Ghosts

 

Andrew Lang, the Scottish author of the perennially popular Color Fairy Stories, also wrote one of my favorite books on dreams. Titled The Book of Dreams and Ghosts, it was first published in 1897. As the title suggests, Lang’s focus is on dream encounters with the departed. He affected a cool skepticism towards his subject material, which allowed him to slide us right into the deep end, recounting cases of timefolding and interdimensional travel in dreams.

As a consummate storyteller, Lang was always alert for the story value of his material. His main question of dreams is which dreams make the best stories. He concludes that the dreams that make the best stories are those that reveal the “unknown past”, “the unknown present” and the “unknown future”. 

Dreams only form subjects of good dream-stories when the vision coincides with an adequately represents an unknown event in the past, the present or the future…If we dreamed of being present at an unchronicled scene in Queen Mary’s life, and if, after the dream was recorded, a document proving its accuracy should be for the first time recovered, then there is matter for a good dream-story.  

His references to his own dream life, though modest and brief, suggest he had experiential insight into his subject: “In dreams…we see the events of the past (I have been at Culloden fight and at the siege of Troy”).

He collects examples of shared dreams and uses that term for them. In one case he cites, three members of the Swithinbanks family (the father and two sons) dream the mother’s death on the same night and discover in the morning that the dream was fulfilled.

 Lang gives several examples of dreams that revealed the location of lost objects. Thus a lawyer dreams that a check he has lost is curled around a street railing – and finds it at that exact place when he goes looking for it. A girl in Lang’s family dreamed that  missing ducks’ eggs were at a place in a certain field, where they proved to be. An “Irish lady” dreamed a lost key was lying at the root of a certain tree, and found it there.

Picture: Andrew Lang by W.B. Richmond for Century magazine.

 

The Case of the Bishop's Pig and Other Dream Stories from Andrew Lang

One of my favorite books on dreams is Andrew Lang’s The Book of Dreams and Ghosts, first published in 1897. The prolific and popular author of the “color” series of fairytales affected a cool skepticism towards this subject material, which allowed him to slide us right into the deep end, recounting cases of timefolding and interdimensional travel in dreams.

    As a consummate storyteller, Lang was always alert for the story value of his material. His main question of dreams is which dreams make the best stories. He concludes that the dreams that make the best stories are those that reveal the “unknown past”, “the unknown present” and the “unknown future”.

Dreams only form subjects of good dream-stories when the vision coincides with and adequately represents an unknown event in the past, the present or the future…If we dreamed of being present at an unchronicled scene in Queen Mary’s life, and if, after the dream was recorded, a document proving its accuracy should be for the first time recovered, then there is matter for a good dream-story.

His references to his own dream life, though modest and brief, suggest he had experiential insight into his subject: “In dreams…we see the events of the past (I have been at Culloden fight and at the siege of Troy)”.

    He collects examples of shared dreams (and uses that term for them):

-          Five members of the Ogilvie family, in different locations dream that a family dog – a poodle called Fanti – goes mad. Subsequently, the poodle lives on, sane and harmless, for the rest of his natural life. However, Lang does not comment on the fact that an action was taken in one of the dreams, in which the family threw the dog into the fire.

-          Three members of the Swithinbanks family (father and two sons) dream the mother’s death on the same night and discover in the morning that indeed she died that night,

Lang also gives several examples of dream tracking (my turn) in which dreams reveal the location of lost objects, making allowance for the possibility that the dreaming mind may simply be making better sense of details half-observed in waking life:

-          a lawyer dreams that a check he has lost is curled around a street railing (he dropped it when he went out to post letters)

-          a girl in Lang’s family dreamed that the missing ducks’ eggs were at a place in a certain field, where they proved to be

-          an Irish lady dreamed a lost key was lying at the root of a certain tree

Lang’s story collection includes one of my all-time favorite accounts of dream precognition, which I discuss in Conscious Dreaming as The Case of the Bishop’s Pig. Here is Lang’s original version:

THE PIG IN THE DINING-ROOM.

Mrs. Atlay, wife of a late Bishop of Hereford, dreamed one night that there was a pig in the dining-room of the palace. She came downstairs, and in the hall told her governess and children of the dream, before family prayers. When these were over, nobody who was told the story having left the hall in the interval, she went into the dining-room and there was the pig. It was proved to have escaped from the sty after Mrs. Atlay got up.

“Millions of such things are dreamed”, Lang comments. At first sight, the dream is of “the common grotesque type” – except that it proved to be a quite literalistic preview of an incident that was played out in ordinary life. The Case of the Bishop’s Pig reminds us that we don’t want to skip asking whether elements of a dream could be played out in the future, even when the dream content seems “weird” or “grotesque”.

Art: Prize Pig, Cardiff by Richard Whitford (1872)

Dreaming on paper

In a writing life, the great moments are when you are dreaming on paper (or on a keyboard). Words stream almost effortlessly from springs that are not accessible in lesser states of consciousness. Clock time no longer rules. In an expansive now-time, more is possible in minutes than might otherwise come in days. Improbable connections are made and prove to be exactly right.
    This is conscious dreaming. You straddle the worlds. You are the shaper, not merely the amanuensis, for the images bubbling up from those fresh springs.

     If you want the experience of dreaming on paper as a reader, there is no better book to open than Kazuo Ishiguro's marvelous novel The Unconsoled. The novel unfolds exactly in the manner of a dream, with a dream's elasticity of time and space and sudden shifts in perspective and identification of self and others.

     The opening is masterful. A world-famous pianist, Ryder, arrives in an unidentified Central European city on a mission he can't remember. He is deposited at a grand hotel that at first seems eerily deserted. Then an elderly porter appears as his guide and delivers an impossibly long and eccentric monologue during an elevator ride in which he holds heavy suitcases in midair because of a bizarre work ethic. Ryder drifts off to sleep in a room that morphs into his childhood bedroom, complete with plastic soldiers deployed on the floor.
     In the days that unfold, his life is dictated by other people's urgencies. Their needs and identities are very unstable. The porter wants him to go to a cafe in the Old City to meet his daughter. When the porter's daughter - at first a complete stranger - reveals that she is Ryder's wife, Ryder accepts that it must be so. On another hurried errand, Ryder fears facing a woman ticket collector without a ticket - then recognizes her as a girl he knew in England when he was nine. This woman he hasn't seen since she was nine now proceeds to rebuke him for failing to show up for dinner the night before. Instead of denying knowledge of the dinner, he accepts the rebuke and agrees to meet her at the end of the day so she can show him off to her friends. When he does so, after a string of hectic digressions, the friends gabble on about the famous Mr Ryder without recognizing that he is present - and he can't find the words to announe himself.
     The geography of the unnamed city is oneiric. Ryder is sent to a practice room to play the piano and it looks like a combination of a laundry and a public restroom. He travels for miles and miles through forests to a meeting far from the city, then finds that by stepping through a door he is back inside the hotel or restaurant from which he departed. The shifts of scene and perspective are also the stuff of dreams. Someone reminds you of someone else, and transforms into that other person.
     We learn that all the febrile excitement in this music-mad city centers on a plot to replace the conductor of the orchestra with a man who has been a falling-down drunk for years. The grand concert intended to bring this plan to fruition - where the grand finale is to be a speech and piano solo by Ryder - collapses in fantastic chaos, as dawn is breaking. Ryder never gives the performance for which he came to the city. Nor does he even get the breakfast that is now served at the concert hall, which has turned into the hotel. We last see him on a tram where an electrician is embarking on a monologue reminiscent of that of the hotel porter. By oneiric logic, Ryder finds the bacon and croissants he craves on board the tram, and we are left with the scene of him eating them, on a tram that goes round and round, like a recurring dream, the kind in which we never become conscious that we could make different choices.

     Andrew Lang, a great Scottish explorer of dreams (author of Dreams and Ghosts as well as editor of the beloved Color Books of fairy stories) said that the best dream-inspired stories are those that never mention dreams. Kazuo Ishiguro has managed to deliver a sustained dream narrative that runs for 535 pages and mentions dreams on just one page (page 416) where a minor character, the hotel manager's wife, confesses that she feels a "tenderness" in dreams she cannot express outside them.

     Readers may notice Ishiguro's play on Kafkaesque themes and tropes in The Castle. What excites me about The Unconsoled is the direct transfer of the geography and logic of dreaming to a long narrative form. Apart from some unavoidable interruptions, I was unable to put this book down until I finished it, two days after I picked it up at the magic bookstore on the corner of the street. As I gobbled the pages, I felt something releasing - like a spring - inside my own creative imagination.

    Now I recall that more than a decade ago, an earlier novel by the same author had a similar effect on me. That was An Artist of the Floating World, a beautiful exploration of the nature of self-forgiveness, and the need for it. Reading that novel - very different from The Unconsoled - at exactly the right moment helped trigger a series of imaginal encounters and discoveries from which my book Dreamgates was born.

     I don't know whether Kazuo Ishiguro keeps a dream journal or how much he borrows from his personal dreams. But he certainly knows the geography of dreams, and dreams richly on paper.

Andrew Lang on the best dream stories

Andrew Lang (1844-1922), a prolific Scots author best-known for his popular "color" books of fairy stories, wrote a book on dreams that is one of my favorites. Titled The Book of Dreams and Ghosts, it was first published in 1897. Lang affected a cool skepticism towards this subject material, which allows him to slide readers cunningly into the deep end, as he recounts case after case of timefolding and interdimensional travel in dreams, based on research ranging from Classical literature to Highland folklore and reports from his neighbors.
    As a consummate storyteller, Lang was always alert for the story value of his material. He raises the question: Which dreams make the best stories? He concludes that the dreams that make the best stories are those that reveal the “unknown past”, “the unknown present” and the “unknown future”. In other words, he especially likes dreams that reveal episodes in regular life that were previously unknown but can be subsequently verified. If we dreamed of being present in "an unchronicled scene" at the court of a long-dead queen, and a document confirming what we witnessed were later discovered, "then there is matter for a good dream-story."
    "Perhaps nothing, not even a ghost, is so staggering to the powers of belief as a well-authenticated dream which strikes the bull's eye of facts not known to the dreamer nor capable of being guessed by him...What we need is a dream or vision of the unknown past, corroborated by a document not known to exist at the time when the vision took place and was recorded."
    Here Lang describes a core element in the discipline I call dream archaeology, of whose findings I give many examples in my own books, including Dreaming the Soul Back Home and the forthcoming The Boy Who Died and Came Back.
     Lang's references to his own dream life, though modest and brief, suggest he had experiential insight into his subject and that he believed he was a time traveler in his dreams: “In dreams, we see the events of the past. I have been at Culloden fight and at the siege of Troy."
     He understood that dreaming is social as well as individual, and that we meet others in our dreams and may find we have memories of these encounters. He made a collection of reports of shared dreams (and used that term for them) including the following:

- Five members of the Ogilvie family, in different locations dream that a family dog – a poodle called Fanti – goes mad. Subsequently, the poodle lives on, sane and harmless, for the rest of his natural life. Lang leaves us to speculate on whether the dog's fate was changed when one of the dreamer's took action in his dream, throwing the poodle into the fire.

- Three members of the Swithinbanks family (father and two sons) dream the mother’s death on the same night and discover in the morning that indeed she died that night,

Lang gives several examples of dream tracking (my term) in which dreams reveal the location of lost objects.

- a lawyer dreams that a check he has lost is curled around a street railing (he dropped it when he went out to post letters)
- a girl in Lang’s family dreams that the missing ducks’ eggs were at a place in a certain field, where they proved to be
- an Irish lady dreams a lost key was lying at the root of a certain tree, where it is subsequently found.

He allows that in such cases, the dreaming mind may simply be putting half-observed data together better than its waking counterpart. But he also tips us a huge wink that dreamers may see such things because while the body sleeps, the dream self is out and about a-roving.

The Blood Red Fairy Book

A lovely girl is left to tend the ashes at home while the mother takes her ugly sister to the ball at the king's palace. However, by magic the cinder-girl is dressed like a princess and transported to the ball where the handsome prince falls in love with her. When she disappears, all he has of her is a slipper and some other personal items. He vows to marry the one whose foot fits the slipper. Eventually the prince finds the cinder-girl, and they are wed.

    Sounds familiar enough, doesn't it? But in the version told (as “The Wonderful Birch”) in the first of Andrew Lang's famous color fairy books (The Red Fairy Book, first published in 1890) and identified as “Russo-Karelian” in origin there are certain further elements.
     Cinder-girl's mother is neither her birth mother nor her stepmother; she is a witch who turned the real mother into a black sheep and took possession of her body. The father didn't notice the swap; he “thought the witch was really his wife, and he did not know that the wife was the sheep.” At the witch's suggestion, he killed the sheep for dinner, but before it died it counseled cinder-girl, in her true mother's voice, not to eat of the meat or broth but to keep the bones and bury them at the edge of this field.
    This she did, and a birch tree grew at the spot in which the girl could commune with her mother’s spirit, which told her to lay birch branches over the hearth to work magic on the three nights of the royal entertainments. So cinder-girl appeared in glorious garments, winning the prince's heart, while the ugly sister gnawed bones like a dog under the banquet table. On successive nights the king, kicking without noticing what was under foot, broke her arm, her leg, and gouged out an eye.
     Despite these aesthetic challenges, when the prince comes looking for the girl who will fit the slipper (and a ring and a gold circlet) the witch files and cuts the ugly sister’s various appendages so she’s a match. The prince is obliged to keep his promise. But when cinder girl later appears and identifies herself in a whisper, he throws the witch's daughter over a ravine where she becomes a bridge from which a hemlock grows.
    Now prince and cinder-girl marry and have a baby boy. Do they live happily ever after? Not yet. The witch changes cinder-princess into a reindeer and inserts her daughter - released from the hemlock - into the prince's bed.
    Baby isn’t happy. A wise widow woman is consulted who advises that the baby should be carried into the forest, among the reindeer. He is nuzzled and nursed by his mother in reindeer form. Is she still lost to the prince? Not if the wise woman can trick her into taking off her reindeer skin - which the wise woman burns. Reindeer-woman shifts into other forms, all of which are burned, until she is obliged to stay human.
   Now witch and ugly sister flee and we may presume happy-ever-aftering...but, boy, how much violence and dark-side sorcery we had to go through.

How wild and primal is the world of the pre-Disney fairy story! The raw accounts of shapeshifting and dismemberment and the imaginal geography of ladders of bones, and talking trees, where a palace can fit inside an egg and an egg can open into a world, are in no way strange to the shaman, and appeal to the natural shamanism of children. While grown-ups marvel at the current vogue for vampires, witches and demons in children's literature, we see that this is not a novel phenomenon. Kids have always loved scary stories, and they used to be a lot scarier than in most popular fantasy today.
    My youngest daughter loved the color fairy books as she approached her teens, and we managed to acquire the whole set over the years, at a favorite used bookstore. She told me last night, “they got me through my difficult patch in middle school. They were my reading therapy, and they tuned up my imagination.” She has permitted me borrow the color fairy books, on condition that I “don't mess them up”.    
    Forests have been felled to publish books about what is going on in fairytales. You can read a sympathetic Freudian (Bruno Bettelheim) or reductionist ones, a legion of Jungians (commanded by Marie-Louise von Franz), or the Guild of the Goddess (who contend that fairytales are essentially women's work and come from a matriarchal past), feminists and anti-feminists, on and on. What counts is the stories themselves, best consumed neat and unbowdlerized. Transactional analyst Eric Berne rightly observes that the stories we remember are the ones that matter most to us.
    Our favorite fairytales are clues to our character and life history. Do you recognize anything of your own trajectory in the tale of a mother who was turned into a sheep and replaced by a witch? No? Then keep looking. When you have found the story that resonates with your life, you can claim it - or change it.