Dreaming for good fortune and fun

 

Crow war shirt in Metropolitan Museum of Art

I love to listen to how people talk about dreams in different cultures. As explained by the great Tuscarora ethnographer J.N.B.Hewitt, the old Iroquoian word katera’swas means “I dream” but implies much more that we commonly mean when say that phrase in English. Katera’swas means I dream as a habit, as a daily part of my way of being in the world. The expression also carries the connotation that I am lucky in a proactive way – that I bring myself luck because I am able to manifest good fortune and prosperity through my dream. The related term watera’swo not only means “dream”; it can also be translated as “I bring myself good luck.” [1]
     In a similar vein, I found a real gem in the work of an anthropologist who paid close attention to his own dreams and persuaded Crow Indians to talk with remarkable candor about theirs. Dreaming can be getting something without having to work for it.

Robert H. Lowie (1883-1957), an Austrian-born American anthropologist who became a leading expert on indigenous North American cultures, kept a dream journal for fifty years. He wrote that his dreams prevented him from becoming "the hardboiled rationalist that I certainly wanted to be when I was young...I could never quite believe that there were no psychic forces in the world because I could not shake free from the inexplicable in my own dreaming."[2]
       He wrote that his dreams helped him greatly in understanding the visionary experiences of “primitive” peoples. “I too hear voices and see visions… The difference between me and an Eskimo shaman who has heard a meaningless jumble of sounds or a Crow visionary who has seen a strange apparition is that I do not regard such experiences as mystic revelations, whereas they do. But I can understand the underlying mental and emotional experiences a good deal better than most other ethnologists can, because I have identical episodes every night and almost every day of my life.” [3]
      In his fieldwork, Lowie observed that the Crow people prized big dreams – medicine dreams – and had many painful ways of seeking one, from sun dance rituals to extreme self-inflicted dehydration to cutting off a toe or finger. However, the Crow recognized that the most fortunate and gifted dreamers were those for whom the gift came in less stressful ways. 
     "Some dreamed in their lodges," Lowie noted. "These usually became rich, acquiring plenty of horses...Men who received unsought supernatural communications of importance without being placed in conditions of stress were relatively few in number and were regarded as remarkably fortunate since they escaped the necessity of torturing themselves. In such cases the Crow use the expression bìwawa'tek (first person: bà-wawi'tawak'), he gets something without working." [4]
      One of Lowie's Crow informants, a successful warrior and hunter named One-Blue-Bead, said that dreams were his “principal medicine." In a big dream he encountered a being painted red and dressed like a Crow for battle, who seemed to be both man and hawk . In other dreams a hawk appeared and shapeshifted in phases int a man. The dreamer received a song:

      I am a bird
      I am coming

One-Blue-Bead said he was poor before he met the hawk man but “when I saw the vision I got what I longed for.” He tied a hawk feather to his back when he rode into battle and claimed that his medicine helped him kill eight enemies. 
     Possession of a medicine dream (baré wact're, distinguished from a lesser dream, or baré rámmacīre) was considered essential to health and success, to bringing soul into life. Hence the willingness to invite stress, undergo thirst and hunger and perform self-torture in the vision quests. One-Blue-Bead wore his dream medicine on his back when he rode into battle. Later, when the war days were over, he gave his dream medicine to another member of the tribe so he would have good luck in getting horses.
      It was common practice among the Crow for people who did not have a dream to pay a powerful dreamer to give them one. One-Blue-Bead told Lowie, “I never had to ask anyone else for medicine like other men. Many people had no vision. These gave lots of property to the visionary and might get a vision through him."[5]

As he neared death Robert Lowie worked on an essay on his own dreams that contains many excerpts from his journals. They are just-so stories; he does not analyze, he simply shares his adventures, which often involve travel and meeting famous people from the past - Voltaire, Samuel Johnson – and remarkably precise descriptions of people and places he never encountered in ordinary reality.
    He concludes by saying that for him dreams are a joy because "One shakes off the fetters of probability and glides through the centuries as though astride a Wellsian time machine. Events of the highest incredibility become commonplaces, and there seems to be no limit to the bizarre juxtaposition of normally unrelated ideas. It is no wonder that when I turn in at night, I feel that I may be launched upon the most exciting part of my septuagenarian existence." [6]

References

[1]. J.N.B. Hewitt, “The Iroquoian Concept of the Soul” Journal of American Folklore vol.18 no.29, Vol. 8, No. 29 (Apr. - Jun. 1895), p. 111

[2] Robert H. Lowie, “Scholars as People: Dreams, Idle Dreams” Cultural Anthropology vol. 7 no. 3 (1966) p.379

[3] ibid

[4] Lowie, Robert H.  The Religion of the Crow Indians. New York: American Museum Press, 1922 p. 321,

[5] ibid, pp. 323-5

[6] Lowie, “Scholars as People: Dreams, Idle Dreams” p.382

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is Active Dreaming?

Active Dreaming? The phrase is a provocation, designed to shake us free from the assumption that dreaming is a passive activity.  I am grateful for the gift of spontaneous sleep dreams, the ones we don’t ask for and often don’t want. They hold up a magic mirror in which we can see ourselves as we truly are. They serve as a voice of conscience. They preview challenges and opportunities that lie in our future. Sleep dreams show us what is going on inside the body, diagnose developing complaints before medical symptoms present themselves, and show us what the body needs to stay well. We solve problems in our sleep. And, as the First Peoples of my native Australia teach, our personal dreams may be a passport to the Dreamtime, the larger reality in which we can meet the ancestors and our authentic spiritual teachers.

I work with sleep dreams in all these varieties, and many more, and welcome them to work on me. But Active Dreaming is far more than a method for decoding sleep dreams. While the techniques involved are fresh and original, they are also very ancient. They involve ways of seeing and knowing and healing that were known to our early ancestors, kept them alive on a dangerous planet, and enabled them to communicate with each other and with other forms of life in the speaking land around them.

Active Dreaming is a way of being fully of this world while maintaining constant contact with another world, the world-behind-the-world, where the deeper logic and purpose of our lives are to be found.

Active Dreaming is a discipline, as is yoga or archaeology or particle physics. This is to say that there are ascending levels of practice. In any field, the key to mastery is always the same: practice, practice, practice.

CORE PRACTICES OF ACTIVE DREAMING

First, Active Dreaming is a way of talking and walking our dreams, of bringing energy and guidance from the dreamworld into everyday life. 

We learn how to create a safe space where we can share dreams of the night and dreams of life with others, receive helpful feedback, and encourage each other to move towards creative and healing action. We discover that each of us can play guide for others, and that by sharing in the right way we claim our voice, grow our power as storytellers and communicators, build stronger friendships and lay foundations for a new kind of community. Above all, we learn to take action to embody the energy and guidance of our dreams in everyday life.

Second, Active Dreaming is a method of shamanic lucid dreaming.  

It starts with simple everyday practice and extends to profound group experiences of time travel, soul recovery and the exploration of multidimensional reality. It is founded on the understanding that we don’t need to go to sleep in order to dream. The easiest way to become a conscious or lucid dreamer is to start out lucid and stay that way. As a method of conscious dream navigation, Active Dreaming is not to be confused with approaches that purport to “control” or manipulate dreams; it is utterly misguided to seek to put the control freak in the ego in charge of something immeasurably wiser and deeper than itself.

Third, Active Dreaming is a way of conscious living. 

This requires us to reclaim our inner child, and the child’s gift of spontaneity, play and imagination. It requires us to claim the power of naming and define our life project. It invites us to discover and follow the natural path of our energies. It calls us to remember and tell and live our bigger story in such a way that it can be heard and received by others. It is about navigating by synchronicity and receiving the chance events and symbolic pop-ups on our daily roads as clues to a deeper order. Beyond this, it is about grasping that the energy we carry and the attitudes we choose have magnetic effect on the world around us, drawing or repelling encounters and circumstances.

To live consciously is to accept the challenge to create, which is to move beyond scripts and bring something new into the world.

This approach is not only for individuals and friends and families, but for communities and for our deeper attunement to the cause of the Earth.  Active dreamers become Speakers for the Earth, and rise to full awareness of the truth of the indigenous wisdom that we must be mindful of the consequences of our actions down to the seventh generation beyond ourselves. Active dream groups can offer a model of intentional community, and can foster a new mode of leadership that empowers each member to claim her voice and play guide to others as they learn to speak and embody their own truth.

Dream art: "Conference of the Birds" by RM

See my book Active Dreaming for the fullest explanation of the basic techniques, includingh guidance on creating and growing dream sharing circles. 

Writing and Dreaming

 

Writing and dreaming are intimately connected, as far back as we can travel through the history of humans making marks intended to be read by others. It seems that in many cultures, humans developed systems of writing because they needed better and more specific ways to record and honor dreams, when dreaming was understood to be a field of interaction between humans and greater powers.
      The techniques of writing may themselves have been the gift of dreams. It is surely no accident that in ancient pantheons a god of writing is also a giver and interpreter of dreams. Ibis-headed Thoth, with his stylus, venerated in night rituals of dream incubation, is a famous exemplar. His consort the star goddess Seshat, patron of scribes and keeper of the akashic records, is also depicted writing.
      The cuneiform scripts of Mesopotamia and the hieroglyphs of Egypt were not devised merely to figure out how many bales of cotton or bundles of reeds had delivered, but to record dream encounters with the gods, and oneiric geographies of the Otherworld. From these recorded visions, mythologies grew and spread their waving fronds over whole peoples.
       Among indigenous peoples, we can see the process at work up to the present day. Look at the intricate pictographs of the Anishnaabe, or Ojibwa, of the Great Lakes. They are drawn on long scrolls of birch bark, the papyrus of the Northeast woodlands of North America. They record the trials of the soul between birth, through trial and initiation, to the womb of rebirth. They depict life as a spiritual adventure, where success will be followed by a zigzag path of new challenge and temptation. They are vision maps. They spring from the soul journeys of shamans, and the shared dreaming of initiates gathered in the medicine circle of the Midewiwin.


Photo: The Egyptian goddess Seshat writing with a stylus, in a carved relief on the back of a statue of Ramses II at Luxor

 

Huge and Hugr: The Norse Polypsychic Self

"The air and the paths were alive with magic." The words come from the Volsunga saga, which excited Richard Wagner and Tolkien and still excites the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse. They are spoken when völvas – seers, forest witches - are doing some body swapping. They are arranging for two men to swap bodies for sex in one case and for deception in the other. Swapping bodies, how is that possible? 

We are deep in a world of sorcery and magic, of dreaming and dream travel, in which the self is not recognized as some kind of unitary thing. There are four members in the polypsychic family. They travel in and out of bodies where they reside and can take different forms. They can become animals or birds or aquatic creatures. They can change gender. Gods do this. Giants do it. Seers and sorcerers do it. Any human may release one of their parts to wander beyond the body, in one form or another, in their dreams. 

In early Scandinavia a human body was a house for at least four separable and mobile aspects of energy and identity: the hamr (“shape" or "form”), the hugr (“thought” as in the name of Odin's raven), fylgja (“follower”, a double in animal, human or hybrid form), and hamingja (“luck”, sometimes like a personal god). Human identity is interwoven with both gods and animals.

The Norse self is a family, not a unity: different members come and go their own ways, leaving the body at will or under direction. This generates several forms of the double, such a key feature of this mindscape that a leading scholar of Old Norse traditions, Régis Boyer, titled a book about them Le monde du double. None of the Norse terms translate as “soul” in the sense of a unique and nontransferable core self. The Old Norse word for “soul,” sál, was a Christian import. [1]   

Hamr (pronounced like “hammer”) is literally “shape” or “skin.” The hamr is the form that others perceive. It can be changed. Shapeshifting is skipta hömum, “changing hamr.” One who can do this is called hamramr, “of strong hamr.” [2] If the hamr of an individual os injured, the physical body receives the same wound.  

Hugr is “thought” or “mind.” It corresponds to a person’s conscious cognitive processes. It can perhaps be called the ego-self.  The hugr generally stays in the house of the body, but can reach across distance as a mental act and have notable effects. Someone with strong hugr reaches and changes things with their mind.  

Fylgja, literally “follower”, is generally perceived in an animal form by those with second sight, although human fylgjur are also mentioned in literature. The fylgja is a companion spirit whose fortunes and that of its owner are intimately connected; wound or kill the fylgja and you wound or kill its owner. Though its name means “follower” it is depicted traveling ahead of its owner, like the vardøger who arrives ahead of its person. The fylgja may appear in the dreams of someone who will encounter its owner in the future. Mysteriously, the term is also applied to the afterbirth.[3]

Hamingja is the fourth of these separable selves. The word is used in the abstract to signify “luck”. [4] However, hamingja is a personified and transferable force. It can be passed on within  families. It can be loaned to someone to help them in danger or sickness. [5] It may be comparable to the personified shimtu of Mesopotamian sacred psychology. When a person dies, his or her hamingja is often reborn in one of their descendants, particularly if the child is named after them. In Viga-Glum’s Saga, the hamingja bequeaths itself to a relative, without special naming. In the sagas the action is often driven by prophetic dreams, 'voices from destiny' conveyed through the hamingja. 

Apart from language differences, none of this would seem strange to many ancient and indigenous cultures, which also regard humans as composite beings. The work of Swedish anthropologist Ernst Arbman sent legions of anthropologists in quest of "free souls", "vital souls", and "ego souls" among aboriginal peoples. [6] The recent work of German Assyriologist Annette Zgoll may help us to understand what is going on in the sagas and the Eddas through lenses from a more ancient civilization that have been brilliantly reground.

In ancient Mesopotamia, Zgoll observes, humans are "permeable beings full of beings" [7], open structures through which permanent residents and transients, including personal deities, protective spirits, dream doubles and demonic intruders, come and go. A human is like a house. The body is a defined structure that gives space to a variety of entities - some more external than internal - that work in humans. So why not call the composite self what it is - oikonomorphic, which is to say, "house-like"? [8] It's a great suggestion, though I doubt that "oikonomorphic" is going to become a household word; for now, you won't even find it on Google. However the description plays well when applied to the Norse polypsychic self.  

With or without the old names, the double is still very much part of folk practice as well as belief in Northern lands. Girls at midsummer hope to call up the image of a potential lover or husband. Psychics are credited with helping police by summoning the double of a criminal. Forest witches talk of sending a double in animal form at a distance to gather information or support someone in need of strength.

Then we have the phenomenon of the vardøger, the double who goes ahead of you. "Harbinger", "forerunner", and psychic predecessor" have been suggested as kennings of vardøger. "Advance guard" or "spirit guard" might be closer to the Old Norse roots. The derivation is from Old Norse varðhygi which combines two names for aspects of our composite nature: (a) a protector, a "guard" or watchman" (vǫrð) and (b) a mobile, separable aspect of "mind" or spirit (hugr). Georg Hygen, a Norwegian scientist and psychic researcher, wrote a book om the vardøger that he subtitled "our national paranormal phenomenon.” [9]

References

[1] Raudvere, Catharina. “Trolldómr in Early Medieval Scandinavia” in Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume 3: The Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 

[2] Price, Neil S. The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. 2^nd edition. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2013.

[3] Price op cit p. 59, Raudvere op cit, p. 102

[4] Ellis, Hilda Roderick. 1968. The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature. New York: Praeger, 1968. p. 132.

[5] Ellis pp. 132-3.

[6]Ernst Arbman, Untersuchungen zur primitiven Seelenvorstellung mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Indien in Le Monde Oriental, vol. 20 (1926) pp. 85-226; and vol 21 (1927) pp.1-185. Arban's most famolus dstudent, felow-Swede Åke Hultkrantz, gave us tyhe spendid work Conceptions of the Soul Among North American Indians: A Study in Religious Ethnology Stockholm: The Ethnographical Museum of Sweden. Monographic Series. no. 1, 1953. 

[7]Annette Zgoll, “Der oikomorphe Mensch Wesen im Menschen und das Wesen des Menschen in sumerisch-akkadischer Perspektive” in Bernd Janowski (ed) Der ganze Mensch Akademie Verlag, 2012. p.86

[8] ibid., p.91

[9] Georg Hygen. Vardøger: Vårt paranormale nasjonalsfenomen. Oslo: Cappelen, 1987.

Illustration: "Leaving the Body in Uppsala". Text by RM+DALL-E 3

Plutarch on swimming with daimons

Plutarch (46-c.120 ce), biographer, Neoplatonist philosopher and priest of Apollo, wrote a great deal about daimons. [1] They can be slippery and ambiguous intermediary beings - thinlk of the "daemons" in A Discovery of Witches - so it is not surprising that his descriptions vary and sometimes seem contradictory. His daimons can be tutelary guides or evil influences, assistants to deities or gods awaiting promotion. There is the daimonion of Socrates, that inner voice you can trust, not to be confused with daimon tout court. The daimon may be an influx of sudden energy and courage, or an enforcer of personal fate. There are daimons in the astral realm of the Moon who mix up dreams for humans in a special bowl, watch over the celebration of the Mysteries, and may descend to intervene in human affairs – and can be demoted and thrown down if they fail to reach certain standards. [2]
     Plutarch seems happiest and most confident when he writes about daimons as spirits of the departed who have risen to higher understanding and can make humans their protégés. In a marvelous simile, he compares them to once-great athletes who gather to watch living swimmers in the sea, leaning in “with hand and voice” as those in the water approach the shore. We are given to understand that this is about more than the challenges of one lifetime. It is about the journey of the soul over multiple incarnations to reach a higher level of being. And in this role daimons are presented as operating under the supervision of the highest deity.
      The passage comes during a dialogue in De genio socratis in which a series of speakers discuss the nature of daimons and their role in human lives. Then we read this, from the mouth of a “stranger”:

 The gods order the life of few among men, such as they wish to make supremely blessed and in very truth divine; whereas souls delivered from birth and henceforth at rest from the body — set quite free, as it were, to range at will — are, as Hesiod​ says, daimons that watch over man. For as athletes who from old age have given up training do not entirely lose their ardor and their love of bodily prowess, but look on with pleasure as others train, and call out encouragement and run along beside them, so those who are done with the contests of life, and who, from prowess of soul, have become daimons, do not hold what is done and said and striven after in this world in utter contempt, but are propitious to contenders for the same goal, join in their ardor, and encourage and help them to the attainment of virtue than they see them keeping up the struggle and all but reaching their heart's desire.
     Daimons do not assist all indifferently. When men swim a sea, those standing on the shore merely view in silence the swimmers who are still far out distant from land. But they help with hand and voice those who come near, and running along and wading in beside them bring them safely in. This, my friends, is the way of daimons. If we are head over ears in the welter of worldly affairs and are changing body after body, like conveyances, they allow us to fight our way out and persevere unaided, as we endeavor by our own prowess to come through safe and reach a haven.
      But when in the course of countless births a soul has stoutly and resolutely sustained a long series of struggles, and as its cycle draws to a close, it approaches the upper world, bathed in sweat, in imminent peril and straining every nerve to reach the shore,​ God holds it no sin for its daimon to go to the rescue. One daimon is eager to deliver by his exhortations one soul, another another. Having drawn close, the soul can hear, and is saved. But if it pays no heed, it is forsaken by its daimon and does not come to a happy end. [3]

 

[1] For a careful discussion of Plutarch’s depiction of daimons, see Frederik E. Brenk “In the Light of the Moon: Demonology in the Early Imperial Period” in Wolfgang Haase (ed.), Philosophie, Wissenschaften, Technik (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1987) pp. 2117-2130
[2] See my article "Pluarch in the light of the Moon"
[3] Plutarch, De genio socratis, 593c-594a. trans. P.H. De Lacy and B. Einarson in Moralia vol 7 (London and Cambridge, Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1957) pp. 481-3. I have made minor changes for clarity.

 

Image: Fresco from a tomb in Paestum (originally Poseidonia) in Magna Graecia (modern Campania, Italy), 5th century bce.

 

Where Too Much Sleep Is Perilous for the Soul

Heavy, uninterrupted sleep is dangerous, reports Roberto Romero Ribeiro, a Brazilian ethnographer who lived with the Maxicali (aka Tikmũ’ũn) of Minas Gerais. [1] In common with most if not all indigenous peoples, the Maxicali believe that in dreams the soul (koxuk) goes wandering. It can fall into bad company, or get lost, or even be taken captive. You don’t want to wake a sleeper because the soul may still be out there and could have a hard time getting back.
     On the other hand, you don't want to sleep like white folks who go out for the count for seven or eight hours. If your soul is away too long, you’ll get weak and sick. The ideal is to sleep lightly and wake several times and share the dreams that are with you with those close to you. 
     When Roberto, exhausted by native rituals, grabbed a few hours' extra sleep, his hosts were worried about him. "Are you sick?" they asked when he stirred. “Get up, get up! You’re going to get sick! ã yok, ã yok! ã pakut ax!"
     The striking vocabulary of dreaming among the Maxicali reflects the view that in dreams the soul is projected from the body. Their word for "dream" is  yõnkup The root yõn means “to throw”.It also appears in the verb mõ’yõn, “to sleep",  a combination of mõ, “to go” and yõn. During lively football matches in the villages, you hear all the time: Nũy ã yõn!  So, to sleep is to go throw the soul. The Maxicali say the dream soul exits through the mouth. It may follow dangerous paths that lead to the villages of the dead. They are uneasy about encounters with the dead, because the departed may be eager to get surviving family or friends to live with them - which would mean that the soul would not return to the body.
      In its excursions, the dream soul may meet many other spirits, of the forest or the waters, of sorcerers or allies. Forgetting your dreams is bad because you lose track of your soul and miss what it can show you from the future. You need t remember where your dream soul went because this can reveal sources of illness and potential for healing.     
      When you tell a dream to relatives or shamans, they will want to know whether you heard singing. The spirit people called yãmĩyxop are famous for their songs. They can be wonderful allies, but they may also demand rewards for their favors, for example in the form of feasts and rituals. The language of debt and payment is used by the Maxicali to describe their relationship with spirits. Someone who is cured by the shamans “owes” a debt to the spirits and must “pay” by performing a new ritual. In this context the shamans are called “collectors “for the spirits. 
     Early chroniclers noted that the habit of sleeping light related not only to the need to keep track of the wandering soul but to scan whatever was going on in the external environment at night. "The sleep of these people is not like, in general, that of civilized people, continuous and long...They sleep poorly and their precautions are constant, whether day or night, throughout the occupied area. A dry leaf that falls, a branch that breaks off from the trees, as soon as the care is heard, it is carefully observed, examined; Stopping what you are doing, you listen while the incident lasts.” [2]

 

[1] Roberto Romero Ribeiro Júnior “Numa terra estranha: sonho, diferença e alteração entre os Tikmũ’ũn (Maxakali)” Revista de Antropologia. vol. 65 no.3 (Nov. 2022).
[2] Jacinto Pallazollo. Nas Selvas do Mucuri e do Rio Doce (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1973) p. 118

Picture: Text-to-image, RM with DALL-E 3

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