William James, Lost and Found in the Multiverse

 

William James, the greatest American philosopher and psychologist and a neighbor of mine in the Albany NY of an earlier time, coined the word “multiverse”, which he gave a hinge, rendering it as “multi-verse”. In  his chapter on “The Perception of Reality” volume 2 of his Principles of Psychology [1890] he outlines a “many worlds” theory in which he describes realities created by mind and belief, including the abstract world of scientific theory and the worlds of “tribal gods” and religion-based afterlives.

      In the Hibbert lectures published as A Pluralistic Universe, James argues for a “multi-verse” as follows:

 

Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational. The all-form allows of no taking up and dropping of connexions, for in the 'all' the parts are essentially and externally co-implicated. In the each-form, on the contrary, a thing may be connected by intermediate things, with a thing with which it has no immediate or essential connexion.
    If the each-form be the eternal form of reality no less than the form of temporal appearance, we still have a coherent world, and not an incarnate incoherence, as is charged by so many absolutists. Our 'multiverse' still makes a 'universe'; for every part, though it may not be in actual or immediate connexion, is nevertheless in some possible or mediate connexion with every other part, however remote. [1]      
    Things are 'with' one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything or dominates over everything [2]  

     God is not the absolute, but is Himself a part. . . . His functions can be taken as not wholly dissimilar to those of the other smaller parts — as similar to our functions, consequently, having an environment, being in time, and working out a history just like ourselves, He escapes from the foreignness from all that is human, of the static, timeless, perfect absolute [3]. 

 

While wrestling with this language - not James' most euphonious -  I came again across this statement in The Varieties of Religious Experience: "The founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine." [4] 

    That “direct personal communion" has been accomplished through dreams and visions and interior dialogue and observation of signs and marvels in the natural world, all facets of dreaming as we understand it in the dream school. James reminds us that religion without dreaming is divorced from its very origins. 

     In The Will to Believe, James offered two insights that are highly relevant to the dismissal of dreaming, and the conditions for useful study of it: "As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use." [5] 

 

And then:

 

The most useful investigator, because the most sensitive observer, is always he whose eager interest in one side of the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become deceived. [6]

In a letter to Henry Rankin on June 16, 1901, he put it this way: ?"The mother sea and fountainhead of all religions lie in the mystical experiences of the individual, taking the word mystical in a very wide sense. All theologies and ecclesiasticisms are secondary growths superimposed."  Borrowing from his friend, the great British psychic researcher and scholar, F.W.H. Myers,  James explained that "mystical consciousness" is related to the existence of an "extended subliminal self, with a thin partition through which messages make irruption."
     For most of us, it is through dreams that the subliminal self most frequently irrupts through that "thin partition" into everyday awareness. James says this about dream reality in Principles of Psychology:

 

The world of dreams is our real world whilst we are sleeping, because our attention then lapses from the sensible world. Conversely, when we wake the attention usually lapses from the dream-world and that becomes unreal. But if a dream haunts us and compels our attention during the day it is very apt to remain figuring in our consciousness as a sort of sub-universe alongside of the waking world.
    Most people have probably had dreams which it is hard to imagine not to have been glimpses into an actually existing region of being, perhaps a corner of the 'spiritual world. 'And dreams have accordingly in all ages been regarded as revelations, and have played a large part in furnishing forth mythologies and creating themes for faith to lay hold upon. The 'larger universe,' here, which helps us to believe both in the dream and in the waking reality which is its immediate reductive, is the total universe, of Nature plus the Super-natural.
    The dream holds true, namely, in one half of that universe ; the waking perceptions in the other half. Even to-day dream-objects figure among the realities in which some ' psychic-researchers' are seeking to rouse our belief. All our theories, not only those about the supernatural, but our philosophic and scientific theories as well, are like our dreams in rousing such different degrees of belief in different minds. [7]

Dwell with that last statement for a moment.  The dream "holds true" in half the "total" universe, and is our way to access and experience this reality. If William James is correct, if we have divorced ourselves from dreaming, we are only halflings, only half present in the universe.
    It does not seem that William James kept a regular journal of dreams, but he did record disturbing dreams from his nights in  San Franciso in 1906 that led him to ask further questions about reality in the mutiverse. He called what happened “the most peculiar experience of my whole life”. He said that it put him in a state of mental confusion that made his teeth chatter. To compound the strangeness, he wrote that the nocturnal adventures that had shaken him to his core were "dreams I could not remember myself to have had”.
     On the night of February 12, 1906,  James slept in a bed at Stanford University. He woke at breakfast time from “a quiet dream of some sort”. While gathering his thoughts, his memory of the dream “seemed suddenly to get mixed up with reminiscences of a dream of an entirely different sort, which seemed to telescope, as it were, into the first one, a dream very elaborate, of lions, and tragic”. He decided that the lion dream must have been “a previous dream of the same sleep”. However, he found the apparent mingling of two dreams to be “something very queer, which I had never before experienced” – and deeply troubling.
    The following night, he woke from heavy sleep in the middle of a dream. Thinking about the dream he became confused by the irruption of two more dreams into his memory. They “shuffled themselves abruptly in between the parts of the first dream” and he could not grasp their origin.
   “Whence come these dreams? I asked. They were close to me, and fresh, as if I had just dreamed them; and yet they were far away from the first dream.” He could not find a connection between them. One had a “cockney atmosphere”, and “happened to someone in London”. The other two dreams had American locales. In one, perhaps the one from which he wakened, he was trying on a coat. The other was “a sort of nightmare and had to do with soldiers”
     Each dream had completely different content and a distinct emotional charge. Yet as they telescoped in and out of each other, James noted, “I seemed to myself to have been their common dreamer, they seemed quite as distinctly not to have been dreamed in succession, in that one sleep… I seemed thus to belong to three different dream-systems at once, no one of which would connect itself either with the others or with my waking life. I began to feel curiously confused and scared, and tried to wake myself up wider, but I seemed already wide-awake.” [emphasis added]
     His emotional response was amazingly strong. “Presently cold shivers of dread ran over me: am I getting into other people's dreams?” Was this telepathy, or a descent into dementia and mental confusion, even multiple personality disorder?
     "Decidedly I was losing hold of my 'self,' and making acquaintance with a quality of mental distress that I had never known before, its nearest analogue being the sinking, giddying anxiety that one may have when, in the woods, one discovers that one is really lost."
    Who is the dreamer? Whose are the dreams? He repeated the question over and over, even in the published version of his notes. “Whose? whose? WHOSE? Unless I can attach them, I am swept out to sea with no horizon and no bond, getting lost. …My teeth chattered at the thought.”
     His experiences increased his empathy for those diagnosed with dementia, Verwirrtheit [mental confusion] or suffering “invasions of secondary personality”. “We regard them as simply curious; but what they want in the awful drift of their being out of its customary self, is any principle of steadiness to hold on to. We ought to assure them and reassure them that we will stand by them, and recognize the true self in them to the end.”
     Desperate to explain what had happened to him on those San Francisco nights, he played with the notion that it had something to do with the hour of waking. On going to bed, he normally slept heavily until after two. On the nights of multiple dreams, he had woken around midnight. He had never remembered “midnight dreams" before. Was it possible that his mind was playing catchup, bringing him dreams from midnights past that had escaped him until now? The idea gave him relief. He had been scared to let himself return to sleep and dreams. Now he lay down, fell asleep, and woke at seven with “a curious, but not alarming, confusion between two dreams.”
     As things settled, James continued to be haunted by the shock of those San Francisco nights. “My confusion was foudroyante [like a lightning bolt], a state of consciousness unique and unparalleled in my 64 years of the world's experience.” 
     He felt unable to rule out the possibility that his multiple dreams were produced by “a telepathic entrance into someone else's dreams” or “a doubling up of personality".
     “I don't know now 'who' had those three dreams, or which one 'I' first woke up from, so quickly did they substitute themselves back and forth for each other, discontinuously…To this day I feel that those extra dreams were dreamed in reality, but when, where, and by whom, I cannot guess.”
It appears that James never settled his inquiry as to what had made his teeth chatter, though brilliantly equipped to do so. He used the term "multiverse" but did not make the full connection with dreaming, which may be our best way to observe and understand the many worlds on a human level. In serial dreams, in which we find ourselves in parallel realities over time, we learn that we may be living continuous lives elsewhere. Through nested and multiple interactive dreams we awaken to the probability that we and our dream doubles are active in many realities at the same time. Growing the practice of conscious, volitional dreaming is the royal road to fulfilling James' aim of expanding the "margins" of  consciousness  and our understanding of the nature of reality. He stood on the cusp but held back. 

References

1. William James, A Pluralistic Universe. London: Lomgmans, Green, 1909. p. 324

2. ibid., p. 321.

3. ibid, p. 318.

4.  William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. London: Longmans, Green 1952, p.31.

5. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. London: Longmans, Green, 1897.

6. ibid, p. 21

7.  William James, Principles of Psychology.  New York: Henry Holt, 1890 vol. 2, p.294n. 

8. James kept a detailed record of his experiences in his college bed in San Francisco on the nights of February 12-13, 1906 but it gives only brief and vague impressions of the content of the dreams that appalled him. He published most of these journal pages in an essay on the expansion of the field of consciousness in a scholarly journal in 1910. See William James, “A Suggestion About Mysticism” in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods Vol. 7, No. 4 (Feb. 17, 1910) 85-92.

Drawing of William James on Willett Street by Robert Moss

To an Unknown Rain God

 

To an Unknown Rain God

I want to know how to stop the rain.
I met a shaman once in a dry country
who showed me how to call the rain
with a snake dance and sex magic.
When I asked him how to stop the rain
he turned snake eyes on the crazy white man
and wouldn’t talk to me any more.

I have heard of a Chinese rainmaker
who was summoned to a parched village
and sat in a hut for three days
speaking to no one until the clouds opened.
Asked to explain, he said, “On arriving
I felt great imbalance in myself
and sat in stillness until balance was restored.
Then there was no need for drought.”

I know something of rainmakers
but not the secrets of rain-stoppers
and I have not been introduced to the rain god
of these green forests where night and day
water slaps and spouts and gushes
and the brown river rises six feet in an hour.

I am writing this poem to see if it will pause
the rain. It is about a horny frog king
who lives in a lake above the clouds
and mates constantly with his harem.
When he catches a fresh crop of dreamy princesses
the spurting and squirting and sloshing
makes the lake burst its banks and flood the earth
like a bathroom overhead with the taps left running.

This does not please the lordly blue heron
who must have sunlight to dry his wings
So now the heron sails high above earth
above the pleasure- pond of the frog king
to drape his wings on the warm stove of the sun.
Then great heron dives, and gobbles frog brides.
Those that were once human slip from his beak
and flutter back to the world where they were stolen.
The frog king hides, squat and still, at the bottom
of his lake. Far below, there is a break in the rain.

What’s that? You say it is raining harder than ever?
I do not know whether the rain god of these parts
has a sense of humor, but he is sticking his tongue out.

- Robert Moss, Sueño Azul, February 5, 2009

 

Comment: I wrote this while leading a retreat in Costa Rica. The train was louder than the howler monkeys amd it kept up day after day.
    My text-generated image recalls my visionary encounter with a local shaman-hunter who painted himself the color of the poison-dart frog, whose venom he used on his blow darts and arrows.
     When my host at the lodge heard me describe this encounter she opened a pod of the achiote plant, used by the natives of these parts for face paint. She inscribed a spiral on my forehead, telling me this was the mark of a chief, then wavy lines on my left cheek, for power over lakes, and straight lines on my right cheek for power over lands. She left it to me to mark the red rings around the eyes, pressing my forefinger against what look like pomegranate seeds but instantly yield the exact orange-red of the poison-dart frog.

Chekhov’s Dream of the Monk in Black

"I wrote 'The Black Monk' without any melancholy, in cold reflection,"  the Russian writer Anton Chekhov informed the publisher Aleksei Suvorin. He said he had dreamed of a '”monk who floats over the field and when I woke up I wrote about him.”

    The protagonist of Chekhov’s “The Black Monk” is a brilliant young philosopher, Kovrin. He is gripped by the vision of a man in black that he thinks he might have heard about in an Arabian legend he cannot recollect. As he describes this to Tanya, the young woman he will marry, it involves a monk, dressed in black, wandering in the desert a thousand years ago.
    At the same time, miles away, a fisherman sees a monk in black moving slowly over the surface of a lake. The second monk is a mirage and yet “from that mirage was cast another mirage, then from that a third, so that the image of the black monk began to be endlessly repeated from one layer of the atmosphere to another.” He is seen all over the world, then he passes beyond the Earth’s atmosphere to wander among the stars. The legend says he is about to appear on Earth again, “perhaps tomorrow.”

     After sharing what his fiancée calls a “queer mirage”, Kovrin wanders towards sunset into a field of rye across a stream. Waves start running through the rye then "from the horizon there rose up to the sky, like a whirlwind or a waterspout, a tall black column. Its outline was indistinct, but from the first instant it could be seen that it was not standing still, but moving with fearful rapidity, moving straight towards Kovrin, and the nearer it came the smaller and the more distinct it was."

     When Kovrin makes way for it, it turns into a monk, dressed in black, with gray hair and black eyebrows set in a “fearfully pale” face. Arms crossed over his chest, the monk glides above the rye for twenty feet, never touching the ground. Then he turns and nods before he expands again, passes through the landscape and vanishes like smoke.
     Later the monk in black turns up for conversations with Kovrin. They sit together on a park bench, or in a room. Kovrin’s man in black assures him that he is a genius who is working in the cause of the "kingdom of eternal truth", in which the highest value and pleasure is wisdom. He discloses early on that he is a “phantom” of Kovrin’s imagination, then adds that the products of imagination are “part of nature” and so he is also quite real. When Kovrin questions his own sanity, the phantom tells him to be bold in accepting the price of creative genius. Normality is the state of the herd; gifted people are hardly normal and often near madness in the eyes of the world. Kovrin is spurred to work day and night on his books and researches.
     Alas, his new wife wakens in the middle of the night to catch him talking to himself. When he explains that he is actually talking to a monk in black, she declares that he is mentally ill and must seek help at once. Carted off to the country, doped with bromides and stuffed with food, force-fed milk instead of his wine and good cigars, Kovrin stops seeing and hearing the black monk. He also loses his gifts and his brains and is soon spitting blood. He goes fast downhill, wasting his years. He leaves the wife who pushed him on this course, but it’s too late to halt his own decline. He sees the whirling monk just once more, at the moment of his early death, just before his life’s blood spews from his lungs and mouth in a terminal hemorrhage.

I was struck by the way the "black monk" appears, rises in the distance like a tornado, or a whirlwind, very much like a desert jinn, before he assumes human proportions as he approaches Kovrin. I felt sympathy between the author and this jinn-like monk.

    Dr Chekhov knew all about the symptoms of tuberculosis. He died of it, at 44, as did his brother before him. "I have everything in order except my health," he told Olga Knipper just before their wedding. One of the cures that failed to fix Chekhov was large infusions of fermented mare’s milk. The autobiographical element in “The Black Monk” is strong. Chekhov wrote it in the summer of 1893 at his country estate at Melikhovo, which his disease later forced him to give up. That summer he took a very keen interest in gardening (like the obsessive Pesotsky in the story) spending hours minutely examining roots and fruits and vines. He also took time that summer to expand his knowledge of clinical approaches to mental illness, with the help of Russia’s leading psychiatrists of that era.
     Chekhov transferred to his character Kovrin his symptoms, and his dream of the monk in black, and also his keen awareness of how life can present wrenching choices.
     Is it possible that Chekhov contemplated a different ending for “The Black Monk”? Might the act of imagination involved in that have helped the author as well as his character?
     I am starting to imagine that alternative ending. Kovrin decides to defy the world  and live the creative life the phantom promises. He sends his wife home to her father – who is as obsessive as Kovrin, but in a different way, with dirt under his fingernails from his experiments in horticulture and his orchard-tending. Kovrin writes and publishes all those books and gives those lectures that amaze Moscow. He trusts the black monk’s assurance that his genius is real, and great enough for him to do the all-but-impossible things.
      How would the story have run then? The author would need to choose between forking paths, once again. Kovrin could die in a torrent of blood as he did before, seen by the world as either the very model of the romantic hero wracked by consumption – or as a vampire lord spewing up his night feasts – or as a madman whose scripts must be anathematized and burned. Or he could come through well in all ways, healed by living all of his creative assignment.
     In any of these versions, I would want to see the author amend his title. The story should surely be called “The Monk in Black” (as in “men in black”) rather than “The Black Monk”.
      Maybe someone in this moment is digging in an old cherry orchard, near Chekhov’s country estate, and is startled by the chink as his spade clips a buried trunk containing the manuscript of the other “Monk in Black” (the version that also got the title right).

The Lightning Paths

 

The Lightning Paths

 

Before lightning strikes

feeders unseen to the ordinary I

travel all possible paths through the air

to find the one way to bolt to earth.

Before the secret green cells in the leaf

drink from its suncatchers, light walks

every path through the protein scaffold.

 

Scientists say that any road taken

collapses all possible paths.

In the leaf, in the air, in a human span

no road, perhaps, is entirely untaken.

If our lives are gardens of forking paths

what happens when we take one branch

with the definite body? Do possible selves

travel on along all the possible paths?

Can we meet each other?

Can the branching paths rejoin?

 

In default mode I departed a mental map

and followed a road I thought I had left

towards an old place. When I saw my error

I thought at least I was on familiar ground

on my ghost trail. I bulled across many lanes

to make an utterly wrong turn and did not see

I was speeding the wrong way on the Royal Road

until I met a familiar, a bull on a steakhouse sign.

 

It's not so easy to get back on a road you left.

To get my head around this

I'll go on a quantum walk tonight

like light in the leaf, like lightning's feeders,

we try all paths in our dreams.

When we are witness to ourselves

we can change the default mode

and weave the many roads into the right one.

- Robert Moss

Dream travels through the tear duct

                                                                  

Pua a'e la ka uwahi o ka moe. "The smoke seen in a dream now rises." - Hawaiian proverb.

In ancient Hawaiian understanding, while the body sleeps, the spirit slips out through the tear duct, called the lua'uhane, or "soul pit". Traveling in a "body of wind", the spirit or dream self may go great distances and have many adventures. These can be the source of vital guidance and healing.

      In a classic ethnographic study, E.S. Craighill Handy presented an example of how this works. A Hawaiian mother was alarmed by the illness of her child. In a dream, she encountered a spirit being who instructed her to go to her cousin for help, telling her she would find this cousin in a house over which certain birds - plovers, or kolea - would be calling and circling.
     Waking, the mother could not identify this supposed cousin, and it was not the season for plovers. To her surprise, she found plovers flying in a circle over a house she had never previously noticed. The woman who met her at the door was expecting her, because she had dreamed of her visitor. She had a remedy for the sick child and she was healed. The women discovered they were indeed kin, most importantly in a spiritual sense, because the plover was the form taken by an aumakua they shared. Aumakua, usually translated as "ancetsral guardian spirit" is a higher aspect of self that can belong gto a spiritual family as well as an individual.

     Hawaiian stories of dream travel often involve journeys into the possible future. One of the most famous is the dream prophecy of Moi, a powerful kahuna of Molokai whose chief was violently infatuated with a chiefess named Hina and had taken her from her home in Hilo by force. Moi's dream excursion showed him a great battle in which the chief and his army would be destroyed. He advised the chief that the disaster could be averted by sending Hina back to her home, which the chief angrily refused to do. Then Hina's sons raised a great force, caught the Molokai chief by surprise and slaughtered him and the best of his warriors.
     As a Hawaiian proverb goes, "the smoke seen in the dream now rose." In the case of dreams foreshadowing danger, the classic practice of the kahunas was to try to "sweeten the dream" (manalo ka moe), a charming way to describe taking action in an effort to avert an unwanted event. Moi could not manage this because the chief would not be swayed from his path.

     There are problematic forms of dream travel, in Hawaiian tradition. Spend too much time in your dream body with a dream lover and you may start losing vitality in regular life. It may be that your dream lover is a being-other-than-human, like the shark god who pleasured a young Hawaiian woman every night, in one of the legends, until her side turned shark-belly white and she gave birth to a baby shark that was returned to the sea.

      A general word for dreams in Hawaiian is moe'uhane, generally translated as “soul sleep” but better understood as “experiences of the soul while the body sleeps". In the recognition that dreaming is traveling, Hawaiian dream lore closely resembles that of most indigenous cultures. It would be interesting to explore how many dreamers and dreaming cultures have experienced soul travel through the tear duct.
     The preferred transit portal for many Australian Aborigines is the area of the tjurni in the lower abdomen or sacral center; Aboriginal "spirit men" speak of projecting and climbing a "rope" that rises from the penis. For the magoi of the ancient Hellenic world, the spirit departed and returned to the body through the mouth (like Aristeas in raven form) or the fontanel (like Apollonius). For Egypt - as for many other practitioners - a preferred travel gate and base of psychic operations is the "third eye" or vision center. Shamans often experience projecting an energy form from the solar plexus. For many experimenters in astral projection or conscious dream travel, there is the "full body lift" in which a second energy body seems to emerge - by rising or rolling out - along the whole length of the physical body.
     As practical dreamers, Hawaiians recognize that there are big dreams and little dreams. While a big dream may be a spirit journey or a visitation by spirit powers. you don’t want to pay too much attention to a “wild goatfish dream”(moe weke pahulu), which is caused by something you ate or how fast you ate it. The “straight-up” dream (moe pi’i pololei) is clear and speaks for itself, requiring no interpretation, but there are also “wishing” dreams (moemoea) that show you something you are pining for, which may or may not be attainable in ordinary reality. There are “revelations of the night” (ho’ike na ka po) that carry the power of prophecy. And there are dreams that are plain "crazy"(pupule), products of the dreamer's inner chaos and confusion, and worth no attention at all.

Sources: The story of the Hawaiian mother who found the house of circling plovers is in E.S. Craighill Handy, The Polynesian Family System in Ka'u, Hawai'i (Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1958). There is a trove of dream material in Martha Beckwith’s indispensable Hawaiian Mythology. I highly recommend a wonderfully accessible book by Caren Loebel-Fried, Hawaiian Legends of Dreams (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005).

Architects of the Imaginal Realm

                                                                   

"You are a space architect,"one of my students told me. "You create tents of vision and bring us inside for shared adventures."

     I like the idea that I am an architect of imaginal space. I dream of scholar cities and pleasure domes, of temples and libraries in a real world that is constantly and delightfully under construction. I invite others to accompany me to the Moon Café, and the House of Time, to the Silver Airport and the Cosmic Video Store. I give them route maps and floor plans. I tell them how to deal with gatekeepers, what to offer and what to leave behind.
     I help invited visitors to frame their intentions: to meet a guide or an ancestral soul, to find a find a new song or look (if they dare) in their Book of Life, to design a home on the Other Side, to embrace a lover in an apple orchard at the edge of Faerie. I don’t lead them around like a tour guide. I open space, then turn them loose to make fresh discoveries on their own.
    The travelers add to the locations they visit. Their very presence makes the ground more solid, the structures more durable and more complex. They are composed of subtle stuff, but may endure longer than buildings of steel and concrete.
     The taste and imagination of visitors add flourishes and sometimes whole floors. In these ideoplastic environments, every visitor is a builder and decorator. A bronze mirror replaces a daguerreotype; a cello is heard in a music room that wasn't there before; a wall of books in the Magic Library rolls back to reveal a druid wood; golden carp gleam in the pool of the Garden of Memory.
    I created a huge tent, the kind used for family reunions and elegant outdoor weddings, and told my invited guests that they could come here to encounter and reclaim multiple aspects of self and soul. I showed group after group the way to this House of Gifts, and to make sure they did not get lost, I assigned the sheepdog of shamanic drumming to sort out their brainwaves. These visits produced marvels. Then I noticed that what I had raised as a tent had grown in wondrous ways. From one side, it looked like a fairytale castle; from another, like a Victorian mansion with many wings and countless rooms to open one by one.
     The act of observation, we are informed by quantum physics, makes things, even worlds. Looking brings definite events into manifestation out of a soup of possibilities, Heisenberg's "world of tendencies." Frequent explorers of the Imaginal Realm are quite familiar with the observer effect. I am constantly astonished, though rarely surprised, by how the travelers who follow my maps change what they look at. There is now a pink woman with an elephant's head at the ticket counter of the Cinema of Lost Dreams, and there is a three-headed oracle on the dark side of the Moon.

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.