In dreams begins responsibility

 

I enjoy playing quote detective. The twin epigraphs in Yeats's poetry collection Responsibilities, first published by Cuala Press in 1914, make an interesting study that involves the valuation of dreams and the very nature of dreaming.
      In dreams begins responsibility. This can be read in several ways. What we choose and do in dreams has consequences. What will manifest in conscious life has its roots in what Yeats elsewhere called the "fibrous darkness". We are responsible for what we do or do not do inside the dreamworld. Or are we?
     Disowning responsibility for the actions of the dream self has been a popular cop-out among Euro-Americans for a very long time. Saint Augustine was one of  those who wanted to deny responsibility for he did in his dreams, since he was embarrassed that he continued to have sex in his dreams after taking vows of chastity. He tried to absolve himself by making a distinction between “happenings” and “actions.” Dreams fall into the former category. Things just happen to you and you can't be held responsible for them. [1]
     This is nonense to traditional dreaming cultures. They know the dreamworld is a real lifeworld, and hold dreamers responsible for their actions within it. Real Mystery initiates and conscious dream travelers - of whom Yeats was one - generally feel the same.
    Where did Yeats get his quotable quote? He gave the source as an "Old Play". Attributing a made-up quotation to an Old Play was a favorite ruse of Sir Walter Scott, and Yeats may have been following his lead. Some hear an echo of a passage in Nietzsche's Morgenröthe:

“Dream and responsibility. - You are willing to assume responsibility for everything! Except, that is, for your dreams! What miserable weakness, what lack of consistent courage! Nothing is more your own than your dreams! Nothing more your own work! Content, form, duration, performer, spectator - in these comedies you are all of this yourself! And it is precisely here that you rebuff and are ashamed of yourselves, and even Oedipus, the wise Oedipus, derived consolation from the thought that we cannot help what we dream!” [2]

In dreams begins responsibility. The line continues to reverberate. Delmore Schwartz, famous as the poet of Depression-era Brooklyn, wrote his story ”In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” over a weekend when he was twenty-one. He borrowed his title from Yeats's Old Play, but made "responsibility" plural. In Schwartz's story, his protagonist's dream double is in a cinema watching a grainy old silent movie. He puts us there, hearing the crackle of the projector, watching the black-and white frames. The movie watcher recognizes his mom and dad, on the hot afternoon on Coney Island when his father proposed. Seething with emotion, the young man in the cinema stands up and yells at his parents, across time, not to get married - and then later, not to break up. An usher hustles him out of the theater - and he wakes up, as the author may have done. [3]
    This gives a further slant on responsibilities that begin in dreams. In dreams, we look into secret places and travel across time. What if – more than just shouting at a screen – we could reach into a mind and situation across time and change something that might alter a whole history? Delmore Schwartz left that question unspoken but it may have occurred to Yeats, who maintained that we are required to question our dreams.   
    Yeats thought that dreams place responsibility on the dreamer to seek to understand what they offer - advice, a warning, an explanation, a deeper reality, conversation with higher beings, interaction with other dreamers. Dreams are to be questioned before sleep and to be examined on waking, to tease out their implications and the action needed. He saw the questioning of dreams as a form of divination. Yeats wrote in his mid-forties that “since I was a boy I have questioned dreams for [Maud Gonne’s] sake” [4] In the Automatic Script of 1919, on being told “don’t forget you are to have a dream,” Yeats asked, “On what shall I question?” [5]
    He was haunted across his life by the aching divide between dreams of a fully consummated love and a spiritual marriage with Maud Gonne, and her repeated refusal to accept him as her mate in ordinary life. There was the unavoidable sense that he had failed in one of the largest responsibilities his dreams had given him. Yet he never despaired of dreaming. He said that the dreams that had been “granted” to him – as opposed to the dreams he had “sought” through incubation, meditation or magical formulas - had been his truest source of knowing.[6]

The second epigraph to Responsibilities takes us to China. It is based on a misreading of a French translation of the Analects of Confucious, probably passed on to Yeats by Ezra Pound. The original text refers not to the Prince of Chang but to the Duke of Zhou, associated by the Confucians with public virtue. [7] The apothegm was originally constructed to mourn a decline in social mores and the growth of government corruption. However, the mention of a dream figure is what seized the Chinese imagination, so the Duke of Zhou came to be regarded as a patron – even a god – or dreams. The sorrow of Yeats’s second epigraph streams from the understanding that to lose contact with the greater minds that become accessible in dreams is to fall from one’s own greater self.    
     Yeats journaled his dreams and visions and engaged in many experiments to set up what we might call lucid and mutual dreaming. He spent a good deal of his time lying on his back in half-dream states. He learned the merits of entering a state of relaxed attention, open to the spontaneous flow of images. “One must allow the images to form with all their associations before one criticizes.” He agreed with Goethe that if one is critical too soon, images will not form at all. “If you suspend the critical faculty, I have discovered, either as the result of training, or, if you have the gift, by passing into a slight trance, images pass rapidly before you. If you can suspend also desire, and let them form at their own will, your absorption becomes more complete and they are more clear in color, more precise in articulation, and you and they begin to move in the midst of what seems a powerful light.” [8] He tried to stay with a dream or reenter it when he was dissatisfied or disappointed with what had been accomplished.
     He made this ringing declaration of his trust in dreams in an essay on Shelley: "I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know." [9]

 

References

1. Augustine Confessions  Book X Chapter 30. See discussion in Owen Flanagan (2000) Dreaming Souls: Sleep, Dreams and the Evolution of the Conscious Mind  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) pp. 18, 179-183.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Cambridge University Press, 1997, p.78

3. Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories (New York: New Directions, 1978)

4.W.B. Yeats, “PIAL Notebook” 8v, quoted in Neil Mann, “W. B. Yeats, Dream, Vision, and the Dead” in Matthew Gibson and Neil Mann (eds) Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult (Clemson SC: Clemson University Press, 2016) p.158 n.18. The "PIAL Notebook", kept by Yeats from 1908 to 1917, was named after Maud Gonne’s Golden Dawn motto, Per Ignem ad Lucem ("Through Fire to Light") 

5. Steve L. Adams, Barbara J. Fielding and Sandra L. Sprayberry, Yeats Vision Papers Volume 2 (London and Iowa City: Macmillan/University of Iowa Press, 1992) p. 166. 

6. Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume I. The Poems ed. Richard J. Finneran. (New York: Scribner, 1997) p.601.

7. The source is Confucius 7:5, as translated by Guillaume Pauthier in 1858 and then retranslated by Ezra Pound in his Canto XIII. See Mann, “W.B. Yeats, Dream, Vision and the Dead” p.155 n.1 

8. W.B. Yeats, Mythologies (London and New York: Macmillan, 1955) p. 344. 

9. W.B. Yeats, “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry” Essays and Introductions. (London: Macmillan, 1961) p. 65.

Dream Events in the Pictorial Autobiography of a Confucian Official

 

#1 Father dreams of deceased mother

In the last century of the Ming dynasty in China, court officials hired artists to help create pictorial autobiographies memorializing their achievements. Sometimes these featured inner events including dreams. In 1588, Xu Xianqing (1537-1602), vice-minister of personnel in the government of the Ming empire, engaged two painters to depict the important events of his life. The album, titled “Painting folio of Xu Xianqing's working career” (Xu Xianqing Huanji Tu), is now in the Collections of the Palace Museum of Beijing. It is valued by historians for its vivid depictions of the Ming court.      Minister Xu selected twenty-five important life events for the painters, describing the scenes to them in detail, and providing them with a lengthy caption for each picture. External events he flagged as important included receiving degrees, surviving shipwreck and snowstorms, acting as imperial surrogate and mentoring the emperor himself. However, inner events in this pictorial autobiography are at least as important. Three pictures in the twenty-five paintings in Xu’s life album illustrate big dreams.   The first painting in the album shows Xu's father, with young Xianqing beside him, dreaming of his deceased mother. We know at once that Xu and his family were fully aware that we meet spirits of the dead in our dreams and can be together in the same dream. Mutual dreaming by two or more people is a common theme in Chinese literature in all periods. Xu gave the artists two turning-point dreams from his adult life to illustrate. One again involved meeting the deceased. The other gives us an extraordinary, if not unique, depiction of recovering a wandering soul - of healing through soul recovery. Xu was not shy about describing the painful and embarrassing context of these dreams. He suffered from recurring and extreme bouts of inguinal hernia that affected his testacles, rendering him impotent for long periods, making it hard to urinate, and causing extreme pain and depression. Many times, he felt close to death and may have wished for it. The doctors’ efforts accomplished little.

#15 Confucian dream meeting

During one of his crises of illness, his dream self left the bed and traveled to a beautiful country setting. He found himself naked, at the entrance to the shrine at the time of Confucius, the long-dead sage. A glow inside the building suggested the presence of spirit. Suddenly a voice announced the arrival of the current lineal descendent of Confucius, whose title was Duke Who. The Duke had come to conduct ritual sacrifice. Embarrassed by his nudity. Xu started running from the scene.Two women pursued him, offering him food including deer meat, which was considered highly auspicious. Though he had long lacked appetite, he allowed himself to be fed by the ladies.

Eating and thinking how the savory taste filled my mouth and how my saliva poured forth. I awoke with the flavor still in my mouth. I then chided myself for having this dream as I waited to see my parents’ spirits and follow after them. Could it be that I am not yet supposed to die? …Checking the afflicted place, I saw that the bulge had broken and no longer protruded…The pain then ceased. Over one or two days, urine poured out and the hernia abated.

The hernia on Xu’s left side healed but he continued to suffer agonies on the right side of his groin. Full healing came from another dream years later, on a dreadful night when Xu thought he was dying, freezing under furs and a quilt despite the summer heat. He was begging for his departed parents to come and take him to a better place. "I suddenly heard a sound like talking and laughing. On my bed, startled, I said to myself, 'This is what I sound like! Could it be that my aerial soul has come back?' Then I threw off the quilt, opened the bed curtains, and felt relieved and refreshed." The artist has followed Hun's description of what he saw in the courtyard when he pulled back the bed curtains: a ghostly homunculus - his double, on a smaller scale, floating under the trees. The artist has succeeded in giving us a rare portrayal of the reyturn of a wandering hun soul, embodied in subtle translucent stuff. The painter has added an arc of pearly light between the diaphanous figure in the garden and the sick man in bed. Looking closer, we see that the aerial soul is going to reenter the sick man's head through a kind of energy funnel. This soul recovery had wonderful effects. Xun reported that within a month, his condition was completely healed and he returned to work.

#22 Return of the Aerial Soul

This is not the story of a Daoist sage on a mountain top or ecstatic poet accustomed to roaming with immortals and lyricizing out-of-body adventures. It is the record of a Confucian bureaucrat trained to exercise sober good judgment - think of Judge Dee - with no mystical aspirations, just the desire to set down important facts from his life exactly as they played out. The gifts of Xu's album for the modern reader include its candid account of how dream events brought healing of a physical condition, the rare depiction of an "aerial soul" and its relation to a body, and the juicy description of the sense of taste coming vividly alive in a dream.

Sources: Xu Xianqing’s pictures are in the Collections of the Palace Museum, Beijing. His texts are in Zhu Hong’s Xu Xianqing huanji tu yanjiu. The translations in Lynn A. Struve’s excellent book, The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World. (Honolulu:University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019) pp. 134-5.