A brush with the Brushwood Boy

I woke early from a dream in which I needed to make up a story for eager children in an ancient or indigenous village. I told them a story of a chief's son who went through various adventures and ordeals of initiation and came back with a new name: "Brushy".
    I was excited about my storymaking assignment and curious about the name that Dream Robert gave the boy. The primary meaning of "brushy" in English is related to "brushwood", a pile of dry sticks often used for kindling.   This reminded me of a story by Rudyard Kipling titled "The Brushwood Boy" that made a big impression when I first read it many years ago. It is about two people who meet in dreams over many years before they meet in the physical world.
    Georgie Cottar dreamed stories in bed at an early age, “A child of six was telling himself stories as he lay in bed. It was a new power, and he kept it a secret… his tales faded gradually into dreamland, where adventures were so many that he could not recall the half of them. They all began in the same way, or, as Georgie explained to the shadows of the night-light, there was ‘the same starting-off place’—a pile of brushwood stacked somewhere near a beach.”    His dream adventures were interrupted by school (“ten years in a public school is not good for dreaming”). Hiss dreaming revived when he was deployed in India as a subaltern.

He would find himself sliding into dreamland by the same road—a road that ran along a beach near a pile of brushwood. To the right lay the sea, sometimes at full tide, sometimes withdrawn to the very horizon; but he knew it for the same sea. By that road he would travel over a swell of rising ground covered with short, withered grass, into valleys of wonder and unreason. Beyond the ridge, which was crowned with some sort of streetlamp, anything was possible…First, shadowy under closing eyelids, would come the outline of the brushwood-pile; next the white sand of the beach road, almost overhanging the black, changeful sea; then the turn inland and uphill to the single light.

In one of the dreams that “filled him with an incommunicable delight” “he found a small clockwork steamer (he had noticed it many nights before) lying by the sea-road, and stepped into it, whereupon it moved with surpassing swiftness over an absolutely level sea” and he is carried into trans-global adventures with the girl who reminds him of a picture in an illustrated edition of Alice in Wonderland. Sometimes she is his rescuer. "Sometimes he was trapped in mines of vast depth hollowed out of the heart of the world, where men in torment chanted echoing songs; and he heard this person coming along through the galleries, and everything was made safe and delightful. They met again in low-roofed Indian railway carriages that halted in a garden surrounded by gilt and green railings."

   A stable geography develops, always anchored by the brushwood pile, a starting point, rendezvous and place of safety. There is the white beach and the black ocean, the thirty-mile ride along the coast that goes to tropical uplands, the Indian railway that goes to a garden where people sit at tables covered by roses, the purple down. Sometimes there is Policeman Day who walks him away from the City of Sleep. 

So thoroughly had he come to know the place of his dreams that even waking he accepted it as a real country, and made a rough sketch of it. He kept his own counsel, of course; but the permanence of the land puzzled him. His ordinary dreams were as formless and as fleeting as any healthy dreams could be, but once at the brushwood-pile he moved within known limits and could see where he was going. There were months at a time when nothing notable crossed his sleep. Then the dreams would come in a batch of five or six, and next morning the map that he kept in his writing-case would be written up to date, for Georgie was a most methodical person. 

The Brushwood Boy and his dream girl grow up together, in the dreamlands. She becomes a woman and kisses him under the lamp while he is sailing back to England on furlough.
    At the family’s country estate his mother tells him she has invited neighbors – the invalid Mrs Lacy and her daughter, Miriam, described as good with music (a composer) and horses – to dinner.

    He comes back from trout fishing very late and through the window he hears the girl singing her own composition, naming places from his dreams:

Over the edge of the purple down,
    Where the single lamplight gleams,
Know ye the road to the Merciful Town
    That is hard by the Sea of Dreams—

He tells himself it can’t be the girl from his dreams. But at breakfast he sees her full face He gapes, knowing her and seeing that she does not know him. Later when they go riding they share more of the geography of their dreams and realize that since childhood they have been dreaming not only of each other but with each other.

"What does it all mean? Why should you and I of the millions of people in the world have this - this thing between us? What does it mean? "

There’s a happy ending. He tells her her how they kissed under the lamp above the brushwood pile, and the dream spills fully into the world. We understand that they will marry.

I am sure that Kipling drew heavily on his own dreams in composing "The Brushwood Boy". In a letter to Richard Gilder dated September 25,1895, Kipling wrote that “I’ve drawn the map of the dream-country several times.” He added, “It grieves me much that you call my yarn a romance for what I prided myself on most was my grey and unflinching realism.” He implied he was writing about real experiences in an alternate reality, a concept that is quite familiar to other dream travelers.
    His story may encourage us to think more about shared and social dreaming - when we find ourselves together with other dreamers - and about mapping the geography of our own adventures in the dreamlands.

Top photo: Kipling in the library of the shingled house near Brattleboro, Vermont where he wrote The Brushwood Boy – and The Jungle Book .He had married a Vermonter and loved his four years in Vermont (1892-1896) writing in a room where the snow came up to his windowsill all winter. 

Bottom photo: One of Kipling's maps of the geography of The Brushwood Boy.

Dream Stories

I dreamed of conversing with Roger Caillois in French before I started reading him, and sought out his published works to honor my dream. I found that he was a wonderfully gifted French dream explorer and literary adventurer, a friend of the Surrealists, a student of games and myths and a traveler in the realms of stones and minerals.
     He edited a remarkable anthology titled The Dream Adventure, which sows many fertile ideas about the relationship between dreams and story. The anthology has three parts. The first is a lively introduction by Caillois distinguishing two fundamental approaches to dreams – that of those who wish to interpret dreams, and that of those who wish to enter and explore the dreamspace itself (which is vastly more exciting and creative).

      Then comes a selection of dream experiences from classical Chinese texts, many of which show the influence of Taoist modes of soul journeying. In one of the Chinese tales, a man on his way home is shocked to hear his wife partying with strangers inside a temple. He grabs a loose tile and hurls it, breaking plates on the table and scattering the revelers. When he returns home, he finds his wife rising from her bed, chuckling over a funny dream in which she was partying with strangers in a temple, then interrupted by someone throwing a tile that broke the crockery. “This then,” Po Hsing-chien (776-827) concludes, “is a case of dreaming spirits being encountered by a waking person.”

      Another Chinese tale, P’o Sung-ling’s “The Painted Wall” – written long before Through the Looking Glass or What Dreams May Come - a man called Chu enters a picture and marries the beautiful maiden he admired in it. Recalled to the other side by his companions’ shouts, he turns and sees the maiden in the picture now has the topknot of a married woman. How can this be? A priest responds: “Visions have their origins in those who see them.”

      The third, and major section of the book, is devoted to dream-inspired short fiction. As all good writers know, while many dreams come fully shaped as stories or scripts, it can be a challenge to turn dreams into effective fiction. If we start by revealing that the action takes place in a dream, we may set the reader at a distance, losing the magical “just-so” quality of an actual dream experience. So some of the most dreamlike fiction may never mention the word “dream”. Caillois has hunted with great skill for stories in which dreaming is an integral and thrilling part of the action.

        One of my favorites is “The Distances” by Argentine writer Julio Cortazar. In this chilling story, Alicia dreams again and again, with increasing vividness and detail, of a sad woman with broken shoes on a bridge in the cold of Budapest; they beat her; she is miserable and alone. When she marries, Alicia persuades her husband to take her to Budapest, where she’s never been. Out walking, she finds herself drawn to the bridge from the dream. In the middle of the bridge is the sad woman with the broken shoes. They embrace and Alicia knows ecstasies of joy. As they separate, she begins to scream – because she sees the smartly-dressed form of Alicia Reyes, hair slightly mussed by the wind, walking confidently away…they have switched bodies.

      Another of my favorites is “The Brushwood Boy” by Rudyard Kipling, who was no stranger to the possibilities of dreaming. In Kipling’s story a boy and a girl who have never seen each other in waking life start meeting each other in dreams and have high adventures that often begin at a pile of brushwood near an ocean. As the years pass, they continue to meet and adventure in their shared world, which defies the laws of ordinary reality. Decades after the first of these dreams, they meet each other in waking life, recognize each other, and come together as a couple.

      I do not know what inspired Kipling to write this tale, through perhaps I should, since I once lived in a house in East Sussex that he visited and was just over the hill from the setting that inspired “Puck of Pook’s Hill”. I do know that the premise of “The Brushwood Boy” – that in dreams we may live continuous lives, shared with others – is quite correct, and (if better understood) would transform our consensual notions of reality. I know this because one of my soul-sisters and I started meeting each other in the dreamspace when we were nine years old, more than three decades before we met in waking life – and have been sharing adventures in parallel realities ever since.