Just before I sat down to write this morning a shelf elf
flung H.G.Wells’ novel The Dream at me from the top of a tall bookcase holding
fiction in the room where I do much of my horizontal meditation. Of course I
had to interrupt what I thought I was doing and explore the themes I had just
been given. In the last pages on Wells' novel I read:
"It was a life," said Sarnac, "and it was a
dream, a dream within this life; and this life too is a dream. Dreams within
dreams, dreams containing dreams, until we come at last, maybe, to the Dreamer
of dreams, the Being who is all beings."
In the novel a man living 2000 years in the future falls
asleep in a ruined city and dreams he is in the body and life of a man in
London in the early 20th century. The dream is presented as an entirely real
experience of another life.
Another character in the novel reports a dream of a shorter, wilder life experienced in a very different body.
Another character in the novel reports a dream of a shorter, wilder life experienced in a very different body.
"I dreamed the other day that I was a panther that
haunted a village of huts in which lived naked children and some very toothsome
dogs. And how I was hunted for three years and shot at five times before I was
killed. I can remember how I killed an old woman gathering sticks and hid part
of her body under a tree to finish it on the morrow. It was a very vivid dream. And
as I dreamed it by no means horrible. But it was not a clear and continuous
dream like yours. A panther's mind is not clear and continuous, but passes from
flashes of interest to interludes of apathy and utter forgetfulness."
The theme that
personal evolution involves relations between past, present and future
personalities - alternate and other selves - was of consuming interest to
Wells, though many of his readers have missed this aspect of his work. After The Dream, he wrote Christina Alberta's Father, a novel in which a
man of modest circumstances thinks he is simultaneously, across time, King Sargon
of Akkad.
The framing device of the dream was used repeatedly by Wells (see A Dream of Armageddon). He also makes us aware that a dream of this kind is more than a literary device; it is a portal to real experiences in other times and other worlds. I have heard that Wells himself dreamed of life as Sargon, who gets a glowing report in his Outline of History.
The framing device of the dream was used repeatedly by Wells (see A Dream of Armageddon). He also makes us aware that a dream of this kind is more than a literary device; it is a portal to real experiences in other times and other worlds. I have heard that Wells himself dreamed of life as Sargon, who gets a glowing report in his Outline of History.
1 comment:
I love shelf elfs. This post is very intriguing. These kinds of dreams are not my own experience - at least that come back with me once I wake up. I'm open to it though. The rest of my life is quite interested in the messages that come in all ordinary life scenes. And they do.
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