The novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) described dreams as occurring in "that small theater of the brain which we keep brightly lighted all night long."
Stevenson said of his now classic novel The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it was "conceived,
written, re-written, re-re-written, and printed inside ten weeks" in 1886.
The conception came in a dream:
"For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of
any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a
scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the
powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers."
His wife related picturesquely how one night e cried out
horror-stricken, how she woke him up and he protested, "Why did you waken
me? I was dreaming a fine bogy-tale!" She also related how he appeared the
next morning excitedly exclaiming, "I have got my schilling-shocker -- I
have got my schilling-shocker!"
Stevenson wrote extensively about how his passion for writing
interacted with his remarkable dreams and said that, from an early age, his
dreams were so vivid and moving that they were more entertaining to him
personally than any literature. He learned early in his life that he could dream
complete stories and that he could even go back to the same dreams on succeeding
nights to give them a different ending. Later he trained himself to remember
his dreams and to dream plots for his books.
Stevenson described the central role of dreaming
and dreamlike states in his creative process in “A Chapter on Dreams”. During
his sickly childhood, he was often oppressed by night terrors and the “night
hag”. But as he grew older, he found that his dreams often became welcome
adventures, in which he would travel to far-off places or engage in costume
dramas among the Jacobites.
He often read stories in his dreams, and as
he developed the ambition to become a writer, it dawned on him that a clever
way to get his material would be to transcribe what he was reading in his
sleep. “When he lay down to prepare himself for sleep, he no longer sought
amusement, but printable and profitable tales.” And his dream producers
accommodated him. He noticed they became especially industrious when he was under
a tight deadline. When “the bank begins to send letters” his “sleepless Brownies”
work overtime, turning out marketable stories.
In his “Chapter on Dreams” (written in his house on Saranac Lake
in upstate New York and published in Across the Plains) RLS gave a
vivid depiction of his dream helpers.
“Who are the Little People? They are near connections of the
dreamer's, beyond doubt; they share in his financial worries and have an eye to
the bank-book; they share plainly in his training; they have plainly learned
like him to build the scheme of a considerate story and to arrange emotion in
progressive order; only I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond
doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep him
all the while in ignorance of where they aim…
“And for the Little People, what shall I say they are but just
my Brownies, God bless them! who do one-half my work for me while I am fast
asleep, and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well, when I am wide
awake and fondly suppose I do it for myself. That part which is done while I am
sleeping is the Brownies' part beyond contention; but that which is done when I
am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the
Brownies have a hand in it even then.”
He observed that “my Brownies are somewhat fantastic, like
their stories hot and hot, full of passion and the picturesque, alive with
animating incident; and they have no prejudice against the supernatural – and
have no morals at all.”
Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson by John Singer Sargent
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