What the Dickens is Happening in Dreams?

"Dickens' Dream" by Robert William Buss (1875)

Cigar in hand, Charles Dickens is sitting comfortably in his writing chair, eyes closed. Through the tobacco smoke, pictures of characters and scenes from his books appear in every direction. Some – like the picture of Little Nell on her deathbed from The Old Curiosity Shop – are in vivid color. Others are only black-and-white sketches. We don’t know whether the painter, Robert William Buss, left his watercolor unfinished or made it this way by design, to show stories rising into full color and form from the author’s imagination - or asserting themselves as characters demanding a place in his books.  Buss made the painting after Dickens’ death and called it “Dickens’ dream”. [1]

     Dreams feature throughout Dickens’ work, across the whole gamut from dreams caused by fever or dyspepsia to the famous visitation dream in A Christmas Carol where Scooge tries to dismiss Marley’s ghost ass “a bad bit of beef” or “a blot of mustard”. We know that Dickens paid close attention to his own dreams and made a study of the contemporary literature on dreams, from research suggesting that dreams are the result of physiology to accounts of dreams as divine guidance or supernatural phenomena.[2]
     Dickens’ fullest account of his personal opinions about dreams was expressed in a letter he wrote, as editor of the magazine Household Words, to one of his contributors on February 2,1851. The contributor, Dr Thomas Stone, had submitted an article of “Dreams” that Dickens did not much like; he wrote eleven pages – some 1500 words, an astonishingly copious response from an editor - to Dr Stone explaining how the essay on dreams should be expanded and reframed. [3]
    Dickens starts by informing the author of the article on dreams that “I have read something on the subject and have long observed it with the greatest attention and interest”.  He then shares the disappointing news that when he has been frustrated in developing a plot, his dreams have not helped him. Instead of providing a solution to a creative problem, they have rather reflected it.

If I have been perplexed during the day in bringing out the incidents of a story as I wish, I find that I dream at night, never by any chance of the story itself, but perhaps of trying to shut a door that will fly open, or to screw something tight that will be loose, or to drive a horse upon some very important journey, who unaccountably becomes a dog and can't be urged along, or to find my way out of a series of chambers that appears to have no end.  [4]

       Dickens expounds amusingly on the “sameness” of certain dreams, for example, of appearing in your “nightdress” in public (as an eminent Victorian, he does not speak of appearing naked in public).

How many dreams are common to us all, from the queen to the costermonger! We all fall off that Tower, we all skim above the ground at a great pace and can't keep on it… we all take unheard of trouble to go to a Theatre and never get in, or to go to a Feast which can't be eaten or drunk, or to read letters, placards or books, that no study will render legible, or to break some thralldom or other, from which we can't escape, we all confound the living with the dead, and all frequently have a knowledge or suspicion that we are doing it…we all go to public places in our night dresses and are horribly disconcerted lest the company should observe it. [5]

    Dickens’ epistolary essay plunges to greater depths as he talks about the importance of paying attention to recurring dreams. He writes openly about his many dreams of Mary Hogarth, his wife’s sister, after her premature death aged seventeen. Dickens modeled many female characters in his novels on Mary, even including similar death scenes. Mary died in his arms in the family’s London house on May 7, 1837, after a visit to the theater. The doctors thought the cause of death was a heart attack. There was no prior warning.       
      Dickens was devastated. He declared “I have lost the dearest friend I ever had." [6]  Perhaps for the only time in his life, he found himslef unable to meet deadlines; he postponed instalments of  Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist that he owed his publishers and public. He held on to mementoes of Mary - a dress, a locket, a ring. He told Mary's mother months at the end of that year  that  "I have never had her ring off my finger by day or by night"[7] In 1869, as he neared his own death, he could still say,  “She is so much in my thoughts at all times, especially when I am successful, and have greatly prospered in anything, that the recollection of her is an essential part of my being, and is as inseparable from my existence as the beating of my heart is. [8]
     With all this depth of emotion, it would be surprising if Mary had not figured in his dreams. Dickens reported that "for a year, I dreamed of her, every night - sometimes as living, sometimes as dead, never in any terrible or shocking aspect. As she had been my wife's sister, and had died suddenly in our house, I forebore to allude to these dreams - kept them wholly to myself." [9]
    We may wonder whether his discretion was motivated by an element of erotic fantasy playing through the dream encounters, though in his thoroughly researched book Dickens and Women Michael Slater contends that Dickens' relations with Mary were entirely proper before she died in his arms. [10]
    A year after Mary's death, Dickens recalled, "I lay down to sleep, in an Inn on a wild Yorkshire Moor, covered with snow. As I looked out of the window on the bleak winter prospect before I undressed, I wondered within myself whether the subject would follow me here. It did." [11]

Mary’s appearance on a Yorkshire moor made Dickens decide to break his silence. He reported the dream to his wife Catherine. After this his dreams of Mary ceased for many years, which led him to suggest that “secrecy” may foster recurring dreams.
     He dreamed of Mary again years later, in a rented palazzo in Genoa in Italy. She appeared mantled in blue like Raphael’s Madonna He tried to discount the dream visitation as the effect of external circumstances. “It was All Souls' Night, and people were going about with Bells, calling on the Inhabitants to pray for the dead. -Which I have no doubt I had some sense of, in my sleep; and so flew back to the Dead.”  [12]
     Dickens reported that in the dream he spoke to “Spirit”, asking, “What is true religion?” He was told that “Roman Catholicism is best for you.” This must have been intensely displeasing for Dickens, who throughout his life was a virulent anti-Catholic. Some scholars have suggested that the dream may have prompted Dickens to look more closely at the role of religion in the lives of the ordinary Italians he chronicled in his later book Pictures from Italy, from the peasant who delighted in making the sound of the rooster Peter heard crow to the dancing and feasting at festivals.[13]
    Dickens professed to be skeptical about the utility of dream incubation on any theme. However, he allowed that we often find we have solved something in our sleep, with or without dream recall. He ascribed this to “the result of a sudden vigorous effect of the refreshed intellect, in waking”.  
   At the end of his letter to Dr Stone, we are finally given the clue to the central role of dreams in his immense literary productivity. He writes that “on waking, the head is usually full of words”. We can picture him now, rising from reverie in the writing chair in the picture, to fill page after page with his long, looping , remarkably legible script.

Dickens letter to Stone,1851

References

1. Leon Litvack,“Dickens's Dream and the Conception of Character” The Dickensian, no. 103 (2007) pp. 5-36

2. For a brief survey of what Dickens read about dreams see  Jonathan C. Glance,  “Revelation,  Nonsense  or  Dyspepsia,”  Mercer  University,  2001, http://faculty.mercer.edu/glance_jc/files/academic_work/victorian_dream_theories.htm. On contemporary efforts to explain dreams by physiology, see Doris  Kaufmann,  “Dreams  and  Self-Consciousness,”  in  Lorraine Daston (ed) Biographies  of  Scientific  Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)

3. Full text of Dickens' Letter to Dr Thomas Stone, 2 February 1851 in Madeline House, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson et. al (eds) Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) vol. 6, pp. 278-279. [Hereafter "Pilgrim"]
4. ibid

5. ibid

6. Pilgrim vol. 1 p. 263

7. Pilgrim vol. 1 p.323.

8.  John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens. ed. J. W. T. Ley. (London: Palmer, 1928) p.841 

9. Letter to Stone, 1851

10.  Michael Slater, Dickens and Women (London: J.M. Dent , 1986)

11. Letter to Stone, 1851

12. For a vivid description of Dicken's palatial life in 1844 in and around Genoa , where he dreamed of Mary Hogarth as a Madonna, see chapter 5, "Work in Genoa: Palazzo Peschiere" in volume 4 of John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens. Easily found online

13. David Parker, "Dickens and the Death of Mary Hogarth” Dickens Quarterly vol.13, no.2 (June 1996) pp. 67-75

 

A Dreamer's Notes: The Mystery of the Unused Hotel Rooms

 

February 20, 2023

The Mystery of the Unused Hotel Rooms

Do you track recurring themes in your dreams? Last night my dreams presented, yet again, the Mystery of the Unused Hotel Rooms.

I travel far more in my dreams than in physical reality and often stay in hotels or upscale apartments. Last night I talked with a deceased friend (very much alive in the dream) at a hacienda-style resort on a private beach. As checkout time approached, I was very conscious I needed to get over to a nearby hotel and settle my bill there. I had rented a room at the hotel for the three nights of my stay but had not used it, as far as I was aware.

Since I didn't get over there before I returned from my dream excursion, I don't know whether I had luggage in the hotel room. I checked my journals for comparable dream reports, tracking the theme.

The hotels and the cities are different in each dream but there are some generic similarities. The hotels are always at least 3 or 4 star, corporate rather than boutique, located in downtown business districts with conference centers and upscale chain restaurants. The rooms I don't use are spacious, sometimes suites. Paying for them doesn't bother me. However I often have trouble remembering the name and address of the hotel and am in a hurry to get there, pick up my bag (if I left one) and settle the bill in time to catch a plane.

What is going on in each of these dreams is a specific situation with its own lineaments. Yet when I survey the possible overarching theme, I suspect that these unused hotel rooms where I have been running a tab may be clues to the wanderings of one or more of my dream doubles. Dream Roberts do seem to show up all over the Many Worlds. Maybe if I can get a look at the hotel bills I can find out more of what they are doing.

"Twin Hotels" digital play by RM

How dreaming gets us through

Dreaming helps get us through life. It can save us from a fall, and even get us to the top. It puts us back in touch with our soul purpose and gives us everyday tools to thrive and survive. I was made vividly aware of this when I did an interview with Wisconsin public radio and a series of callers phoned in, eager to share their dreams.
     A songwriter described how he wakes in the middle of the night with new songs playing in his mind. Sometimes they are complete, with words and music. Sometimes he has to work on them for a bit. He is in a long tradition of songwriters and composers who have plucked new pieces from their dreams. I was reminded on John Lennon's statement that "the best songs are the ones that come to you in the middle of the night and you have to get up and write them down so you can go back to sleep."
     As we discussed diagnostic dreams, the host recalled the case of a man who dreamed a rat was gnawing on his throat. Shaken by the dream, he sought medical assistance, and went from one physician to another until his throat cancer was detected and treatment began that he credited with saving his life.
      An IT professional recounted a situation in which his office was preparing to install a new system. The day before, his supervisor told him to go home and get some sleep. He took a nap and saw himself in a workaday situation. He saw and recognized the code he would be applying. Suddenly the screen in his dream went fuzzy and a voice said firmly, "NO. It should be like this." The code changed.
     When he went into the office the next day, he checked and found that the code they were working with was wrong. He made the necessary changes, as had been done in the dream. "Good thing you caught that," his supervisor told him. At this point, David explained that he had dreamed the correction. "Never heard of anything like that," the supervisor shook his head. "Maybe I should have my analysts do a lot more sleeping."
     A woman caller spoke of a recurring dream theme whose full significance became clear to her only at the end of a long relationship. She dreamed again and again that her partner was missing. She couldn't find him or couldn't get through to him on the phone. Sometimes she felt he was hiding from her. By the time of the break-up, she had been compelled to recognize a long pattern of deception, and that in fundamental ways, her partner had been "missing" for much of the time they had been together.
     We discussed what is going on when a dream theme repeats over and over. I suggested that it's either because we need to get the message or because we need to take action on that message. We may have a notion what a recurring dream is about, but can't bring ourselves to do what is necessary - which would be very understandable if we dream our partner is missing. Like a helpful (and well-informed) friend who is looking out for us, the dream theme will come again and again until we do something about it.

Towards the end of the show, the host asked me to share a "big" dream of my own. How to pick one, out of so many? Yet I knew at once which dream I would tell, because earlier in the program - when asked to explain how dreaming can help to move us beyond hatred and war - I had quoted a phrase in the Mohawk Indian language. The phrase is tohsa sasa nikon'hren. It literally means, "Do not let your mind fall".
    We fall into Dark Times, in the traditional Mohawk cosmology, when we forget the higher world - the Earth-in-the-Sky - from which we come. Our ability to heal our enmities and grow as a life form depend on not-forgetting a higher source of wisdom and a higher order of reality. Dreaming is the main link between our ordinary minds and that higher spiritual plane, a way of not letting our minds fall.

    So I told a watershed dream from my life decades before, in which I entered a space where a circle of people who lived very close to the earth were singing and drumming. I hesitated at the entrance of their longhouse, fearing I was intruding. But they welcomed me into a place they had waiting for me.
    At a certain point, I lay by the firepit, at the center of the circle. One by one, the dream people came to me. They took red-hot coals from the fire and placed them over my ears and my eyes, and on my tongue, and over my heart. They sang in their own language, which I could now understand: "We do this to open your ears, that you may hear clearly. We do this to open your eyes, that you may see clearly. We do this to open your mouth, so you will speak only truth. And we do this -" placing the coal over the heart "- so that henceforth you will speak and act only from the heart."

     I did no analysis with that dream. Vitally energized, I jumped in my car and drove to a lake in a state park east of my home. I promised to the lake and the trees and the red-tailed hawk that came knifing through the clouds, "Henceforth I will speak and act only from the heart."

     On the darkest days, a dream like this can be a hearthfire and a homing beacon. Charging us with the power of a deeper drama, inciting us not to let our minds fall - these may be the biggest ways that dreaming helps us through.

On the subject of Wisconsin dreaming, I am leading a new playshop on the Arts of Magical Dreaming at a lovely spacious studio in rolling horse country outside Madison WI over the weekend of May 4-5. Artist and dream teacher Karen Nell McKean was inspired by her dreams to design this nurturing creative space and have it constructed. "WomanEye" is one of her dream-infused paintings.


Graphic at top:''L'Alpiniste Emballée'' by Henry Gerbault (1916)

At home in winter with the Muse

When my schedule is entirely my own, as it mostly is when I am at home on cold winter days, I do whatever I feel like at any time. I don't think about sleep until it falls upon me. When that happens, I let my body fall into bed. Very frequently, I then find myself engaged in a marvelous adventure in another reality, where other players are waiting for me.

      In the Hittite language, you don't say "I fell asleep". You say, "sleep fell upon me" or even "sleep seized me." I learned this from Alice Mouton's excellent work Rêves hittites. My relationship with sleep is sometimes like that of one who is willing to be seized. I notice that when sleep falls upon me like a lion on a goat, what follows is often a powerful and numinous experience, sometimes an encounter with a greater being.    

     Who are those beings who are lions as well as humans who I so often find waiting for me, as if I am late for lunch or the theater, when I am seized by the need to lie down?
     What was that instrument I was playing after sleep fell on me and obliged me to take an early evening nap? It looked a bit like a set of pan pipes, but I strummed it with my fingers. It seemed to be organic, vegetal, like a dried gourd with multiple tubes, orange and yellow in color. The music it made was enchanting. I was playing it in a jungle setting, near where a river joined the sea, maybe somewhere along the coast of Brazil.     
     I write scenes and questions like these in my journal at any hour. Its what writers do. It's what active dreamers must do if they are going to get really good at dreaming. 

     At 1:00 a.m. on one of these winter nights I sit down to a plate of linguine with home-made bolognaise sauce, heavy on garlic, fresh-grated romano and a glass of fine St. Emilion. Since I skipped dinner and this followed an early evening nap, does it count as breakfast or a late supper? My body is thankful either way.

    If the Muse is looking for me she will almost always find me prowling around indoors between 3:00 and 5:00 a.m. On winter days at home I often take an early evening nap and then stay up until after lunch. I grab a couple of sleep periods - rarely more than a couple of hours each - in a 24 hour cycle. Sleep researchers call me a "biphasic sleeper". Few of them seem to grasp that it is not necessary to sleep in order to dream. I am a biphasic sleeper and an omniphasic dreamer.
    One of my favorite ways to dream is to laze in bed in a state of horizontal meditation after waking. It is in this liminal place between sleep and awake that marvelous things become available. I find myself looking at a parade of faces, or a kind of travel video, offering multiple itineraries and destinations for lucid dream expeditions.
    I check in with my dreaming family at any hour. There are hundreds of them gathered for my new virtual course in Active Dreaming for The Shift Network, sharing fabulous narratives of mystery and adventure,or terror and beauty, inviting each other to play dream detective and shaman of the breakfast table or the supper club. Who was that African princess with gold dust on her face? Who was that tall young Irish lady, regal as one of the lordly ones of the Sidhe, who showed me an illustrated book filled with magic and ancestral tears?
    I flit like a hummingbird from book to book in my personal library, drinking from different styles and visions. I am reminded by Marguerite Yourcenar, in Dreams and Destinies, that a dream report can be written as a prose poem, without need of developing the story or adding commentary or analysis. I am dazzled, again, by the crazy-brilliant mind of Philip K. Dick, as he follows his own manic encounters with God (or the Archon), pre-Socratic philosophy, a Roman Empire that never ended, and mind-incinerating quantities of dope in his autobiographical Valis. I consider Seth's insistence in The Nature of the Psyche that each of us is both male and female and picture him in conversation about this with Jung. 

     I leaf through old journals, choosing passages to develop as stories or use as teaching examples, noting recurring and evolving themes. I find evidence on every other page that I am leading continuous lives beyond my present body. I am amazed by all that would be lost to memory, had I not made it my practice, over all these years, to keep a detailed journal. Did I really have so many dreams of sheep; of a gray sheep as big as an elephant who led me to a spiritual guide, of blue sheep who alerted me to the fact that I possessed unclaimed riches in a place I thought I had left behind? 

     An unavoidable and perennially fascinating theme is the importance of the house in dreams. Often the dream house seems to provide a structure within which we can meet and grow our relationship with many aspects of the self, I take a sip of Bachelard's Poetics of Space (I can't swallow too much of this at one sitting in English translation) on the houses of imagination:

1) A house is imagined as a vertical being. It rises upward. It differentiates itself in terms of its verticality. 2) A house is imagined as a concentrated being. It appeals to our consciousness of centrality.

In all of this, of course, I am putting out lures for the Muse. One of these winter nights I may again write a love poem for her. I did this in seeking fair winds and caresses for The Boy Who Died and Came Back.

Sing in me, creative spirit
of the boy who died and came back
and the man who flew through the black sun
and returned to walk the roads of this world
as the envoy of a deeper world...

     I come upon my notes from Mircea Eliade on theophany, the moment of revelation when a divine agency shines its light through the ordinary world and you cannot fail to notice because everything is different. I remember how when I last landed at Bucharest, Eliade's city, a woman previously unknown to me, a literary translator, greeted me at the baggage carousel by crying out. "You are a writer!" I allowed that I was, and we had a heady conversation while waiting for our bags. When we parted company, she gave me this blessing: "May the Muses kiss you." 

     I hope this will happen again soon. I like my body when my creative writer is at home and the Muse is with him. Muscles better and nerves more. She is a glorious, ardent and insatiable lover. She keeps this body up for whole nights before she lets it drop for a couple of hours of regenerative sleep. I don't complain, any more than you would complain after a perfect night of love, as you watch the stars go to bed over Copacabana, or the dreaming spires of an Old World City, or the Mountains of the Moon. 

    I have seen writers complain that their work involves sweating blood. Maybe, but when the creator is home, in the arms of the Muse, what you sweat isn't ordinary blood. It is ichor.

Graphic: Muse reading from a scroll. Boeotia, 5th century bce. In the Louvre.

When the problem is getting down from the top

In my dreams, for as long as I can remember, a recurring problem is getting down from a height. In these dreams, I often have a great time getting to the top, and at the top. The challenge is to get down again!
    In last night's version, I ascended a height with sweeping views over Washington D.C., with two companions (both dream teachers). Up here, I could gather information on anything I wanted to know, the weather was fine and all was grand - until I realized that there was no obvious way down. We started looking for a safe way down, but could not find one.
    I consider calling to a policeman I can see across a ravine to seek help. Then I decide it would be better to call Superman. I have his mother's number. She is Ma Bell. When she answers, I ask "Is Clark available?" Not immediately, it seems, but she'll pass on a message.
    I inspect the near-vertical cliffs again, looking for places where there might be handholds and footholds. Not promising.
    I became lucid at this point. One of the triggers for lucidity - in dreams or waking life - is waking up to the fact that we are in a situation that has repeated, over and over. I considered my options, now fully aware that I was dreaming and could choose to do anything I liked inside the dream landscape. Could I simply jump off the edge and start flying? I had flown Superman-style in dreams and journeys many times. Couldn't I deploy the Superman power I had tried to call in before I became lucid?
    Nope, it wasn't that kind of a dream. More specifically, I was not in the kind of dream body that you can simply throw off a cliff. The dreamlands have their own integrity and solidity. You can fly in some, or shapeshift, but others operate by physical laws that are similar to those of the ordinary world - sometimes because they are physical environments that exist in future or parallel time. I have written about this situation before on this blog.
    In last night's dream, I was required to figure out the way down from the height. With the help of one of my companions (the other shrunk away from the edge, terrified of heights) I inspected and rejected several options for descending the steep cliffs on all sides. Eventually I found that a structure behind me on the hill contained an elevator in perfect working order that took us safely down. 
    I did not fail to note that recognizing the presence and need for a little "structure" may be a condition for getting grounded and bringing things down from an upper level of consciousness to where people live!

Forgetting the address of the guest house of this world

It's happened again. I've set off on a walk around a city I don't know and now I can't remember the name or street address of the place where I am staying. I've left my cell phone in the room, so I can't call even if I had the number in the address book, which seems unlikely.
    No grid pattern to the streets here. They curve and twist, and it's hard to keep track of all the changing names. I have walked far from the quietly genteel neighborhood where I am staying. In dark alleys and loading areas around the big train station ahead, men huddle, waiting for something, perhaps for work for a day.
    I'm not all that worried about finding my way back to where I started, because I feel my homing instinct will get me there. I have no mental image of the geography, but feel in my body that I have walked two sides of a huge rectangle, and need only to walk the other two sides. I had better keep moving because not it is snowing.
   It takes little time to get back to a place I recognize. Across a busy multi-lane road that runs towards green mountains, I see a street of pleasant Victorian houses with a one-way arrow pointing my way. I passed this earlier, en route the the B&B in the next street where I am staying. There's a gap in the traffic. I hurry across, and am soon back at the B&B, inspecting the little sign by the front gate: Deucas Manor. My host has permed hair and the airs and prejudices of the petit bourgeois. She won't hear of me going to community theater when I announce that as my intention for later; I'll go anyway.
    Why am I here? There's a clue in the things I have arranged on my dresser. They include tiny black-and-white photographs of myself as a baby and a young child, and others of family members. I seem to be on a quest for my origins.

No strong feelings around this dream. It was the last of a series in which I was country-hopping overnight. In a previous dream, I was staying in a borrowed apartment in a city in Eastern Europe. The word "Deucas" has no immediate resonance with me, though word-play brings up a range of possible associations. I don't expect to stay at a B&B called Deucas Manor, but I never say never about future travel options, especially when my dream self has gone to certain places ahead of me.
     The theme of not being able to remember where I'm staying has been quite common in my sleep dreams, over the years, and that is rich in associations. I have photos like the ones in my dream in a little leather file on my desk; I have been on a quest to remember and write about certain episodes from very early in this life. The photos in the dream are different; I am all but certain I have not seen them outside the dream.
     I find a metaphor for life in what I might otherwise tag as a rather "small" dream. I am a visitor in the guest house of this world, needing to keep track of where I started in each life adventure.