The Ur-Ground of Literature

 

 The raw sexuality of her call to her lover is wild and shocking: “Plow my vulva!” He plunges into her like a “wild bull”. When they couple, he is the green life of all growing things and she is the Queen of Heaven. He is Dumuzi and she is Inanna.

     But she is called to go down into the dark places, and travels a terrifying path of ordeal and initiation. When she returns, transformed, to the surface world, she finds that her man has forgotten her, playing king of all he surveys. Her angry curse sucks the light out of his day. Now Dumuzi dreams that everything turns against him. Trees are uprooted, his hearth fire is doused, his drinking cup is thrown down, his shepherd’s crook is taken away. A fierce raptor seizes a lamb from his sheepfold, and he knows that something fearsome and unforgiving is coming for him.
     Death is coming for him, and his only hope lies in the love and feminine wisdom of his younger sister, Geshtin-anna. She is a reader, “a tablet-knowing scribe”, who knows the meaning of words and of dreams.
    She helps him to hide, but in the end he cannot escape his own demons. He is overpowered by galla demons and carried down to the realm of Inanna’s dark double, the Queen of the Underworld, into his own cycle of death and rebirth.. Grieving, both Inanna and his constant sister will seek him in the lower world, using drumming, like shamans. And they will make a deal by which Geshtin-anna will take her brother’s place in the Underworld for half the year, giving him time up top with the goddess in her sunnier disposition. But that is a later story in the cycle of Inanna.
    The Dream of Dumuzi is the oldest recorded dream. It was written in Sumer nearly five thousand years ago, scored with marks on baked clay that look like the tracks of a very thoughtful sandpiper. Almost certainly, it was written by a woman. We can’t miss the fact that the first dream interpreter on record is a woman who can read and write, the “tablet-knowing scribe.”
    Geshtin-anna becomes the goddess of dream divination (and of wine).

The Dream of Dumuzi, unclothed in its beauty and terror in a modern translation by Diane Wolkstein, is great writing, and takes us where great writers do not fear to go: into the inner chambers of the heart, into the demon-haunted mind, into the mysteries of death and rebirth. Thanks to its survival, we can say without hesitation that one of the first uses of writing – which was invented in Sumer – was to record dreams, and that one of the great things to emerge from recording dreams, at least five thousand years ago, was literature. Writers have always been dreamers. [1]        

Dumuzi was king of Uruk, not far from Ur, the most famous city of the Sumerians and the one from which Abraham set out to found a new people. So Bert States is doubly correct when he says “dreaming is the Ur-form of all fiction.” [2]
    States suggests that storytelling springs from the same “skill” that allows us to produce dream narrativesand compares the mental state of the creative writer to that of a lucid dreamer: “Just as the lucid dreamer is slightly awake, slightly outside the dream, while being largely inside it, so the waking author is slightly asleep, or slightly inside the fiction while being largely outside it.” [3] Many fiction writers (including me) would attest to the accuracy of this description. It probably applies to creative minds from many fields operating in a flow state of relaxed attention or attentive relaxation. In this state, as Samuel Beckett wrote of Proust, the writer may also be, for the moment, “an extratemporal being” [4] 
    Dreams provided both energy and inspiration for literary creation. As a boy, Aeschylus (born 525 BCE) was sent to watch over ripening grapes in a vineyard. When he dozed off, Dionysus, god of wine and drama, appeared to him and gave him instructions for a new kind of theatre. Prior to this, ancient Greek drama was rather static ritual, with a single actor on stage, and a chorus that did not interact directly with him. Aeschylus was inspired in his dream to introduce a second actor; this was the birth of Western theatre. He went on to write ninety plays, although only seven are extant.

“Poetry is always the result of flooding”, a young poet told Stefania Pandolfo as she journeyed among rural Moroccan villagers for whom dreaming and poetry are vitally important, and always interweaving. A real poem bursts from an emotion that is inundating, overwhelming – until it finds creative release. [5] 
   The most respected poet in the area, one Sheikh Mohammed, was alien to poetry until he dreamed of a flood. The dream came at a time of personal trauma when he was close to despair. Previously a violent man of action, he had managed to blow off his right hand in a gun accident. He dreamed the river was coming down in flood, its front like a mountain, carrying everything it encountered in its path, trees and carrion and debris. Instead of fleeing, he stood there in the dry riverbed, watching and waiting. Then he opened his mouth and swallowed the flood and everything borne along by it. He recounted the dream to his mother and she told him that he had become a poet. This became his life’s calling.[6]
     From the priestess-scribe who wrote Dumuzi’s story to the latest novels by Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, dreams have provided wonderful material for stories and novels, scripts and poems. The dream may provide the rough first sketch of a theme or a plot or a character, with everything still to be worked out and delivered – perhaps with the help of subsequent dreams – over a considerable period of time. The dream may have the structure and detail required for a finished story or poem (but is unlikely to be “finished” in the sense that it will be truly good writing until the raw report has been shaped and polished). The dream may be inserted in a narrative and attributed to one of the characters as Graham Greene did for Querry in A Burnt-Out Case). The dream may be delivered as a story without a frame, as Franz Kafka delivered a nightmare in Metamorphosis while insisting, in the tale, that the man turned into a giant bug was not dreaming.
   The literary dream has been used as a plot device in many ways. It may be used to take the reader into the inner life of a character. It may be used to set up critical narrative tension, for example between a character’s desires and his conscience, a central theme in Dostoyevsky’s use of dreams.
    The dream can be used as an architectural device, to open and frame a story that may be anything but a dream; the medieval Roman de la Rose is a classical example, from an age when dreams were greatly respected. In the classic Chinese novel The Dream of the Red Chamber novel opens with a goddess creating a mountain from 36,501 pieces of stone, one of which - rejected - is a speaking rock whose complaint is heard by two immortals and is gifted with a very mobile life, in different forms, in the mortal world – known to gods and immortals as the Red Dust - and elsewhere.[7]

     Writing and dreaming are closely related in daily practice. Writers who keep journals and record their dreams are giving themselves a warm-up, flexing the creative muscles that will work on the larger project. Writers who may not record their dreams with any regularity nonetheless rise from sleep with their heads full of words – as Dickens related in his letter to Dr. Stone – that are pressing to come out. [8]

A writer’s dream may help to “break up the great fountains of the deep” (a phrase Mark Twain used repeatedly) releasing the power of long-buried memories, or bringing through ideas that have been growing in the preconscious or the deeper unconscious for years or decade. That is how Aslan came to C.S. Lewis, giving him the key to Narnia. As “Jack” Lewis recalled 

The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. The picture had been in my head since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it.’
    At first I had little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams about lions about that time. Apart from that, I don't know where the Lion came from or why he came. But once he was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon he pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him. [9]] 

     Finally, it is in dreams and flow states that writers come into contact with inner helpers. Robert Louis Stevenson communed with his “Brownies” in states of reverie, and gave them the credit for doing better than half his literary work. Yeats spoke of the “mingling of minds” that can bring assistance, in a creative venture, from intelligences that seem to belong to other times or other dimensions. Milton described the source of his inspiration as   

....my celestial patroness, who deigns
Her nightly visitation unimplored,
And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires
Easy my unpremeditated prose [] 

Milton spoke of “being milked” after his nights of inspiration, as – totally blind by the time he composed his most famous work – he dictated to a scribe.

 

Notes and References

 1. This translation of the Dream of Dumuzi is in Wolkstein, Diane and Samuel Noah Kramer, Inanna, Queen of Heaven: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer. New York: Harper & Row, 1983, pp 74-84.     Dumuzi (later called Tammuz) is a Mystery god who dies and is reborn, and the cycle of his ever-recurring death and resurrection is also the cycle of the crops in what is now southern Iraq. He dies in the spring at the time Iraqi farmers, in their hot country, harvest their wheat and barley; he is resurrected when they put seeds in the earth. In the Christian calendar, this is Easter time. The Shia ritual mourning for the martyred Imam Hussein at the site of the battle of Karbala – a rite Saddam tried to suppress – takes place at the same time. Life rhymes, and so do the life cycles of gods. See  E.W.Fernea, Guests of the Sheikh. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.

2. Bert O. States, Dreaming and Storytelling. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.1993, p.3. 

3.  Bert O. States, Bert O., “Authorship in Dreams and Fictions” in Dreaming vol.4 no.4 (December, 1994) pp. 239-240

4. Samuel Beckett, Proust. New York: Grove, 1931, p. 56)

5.Stefania Pandolfo,  Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, p.259]

6. ibid p. 265

7. Tsao Hsueh-chin, Dream of the Red Chamber (1754). Trans. and adapted by Chichen Wang. New York: Anchor Books, 1989.

8. Charles Dickens letter to Dr Stone. February 2, 1851; see Warrington Winters, “Dickens and the Psychology of Dreams” in PMLA vol.63 no.3 (September 1948) pp. 984-1006.

9. Lewis, C.S., “It All Began with a Picture”, Junior Radio Times, vol. 68 (July 15, 1960) reprinted in Of Other Worlds. San Diego and New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975, p. 42.

10. Paradise Lost IX. 21-4

Text adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

 

 

 

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

 

What the Dickens is déjà vécu ?

We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time - of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances - of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remembered it! I never had this mysterious impression more strongly in my life, than before he uttered those words.

This is a very exact description of the experience of déjà vu, though the writer does not use that term. The source is David Copperfield. The author, the prodigious Charles Dickens, left us an even more vivid account of the phenomenon of déjà vu in his account of an incident on the road to Ferrara, in his travel book Pictures from Italy:

At sunset, when I was walking on alone, while the horses rested, I arrived upon a little scene which, by one of those singular mental operations of which we are all conscious, seemed perfectly familiar to me, and which I see distinctly now. There was not much in it. In the blood red light, there was a mournful sheet of water, just stirred by the evening wind; upon its margin a few trees. In the foreground [of a view of Ferrara] was a group of silent peasant girls leaning over the parapet of a little bridge, looking now up at the sky, now down into the water. In the distance a deep dell; the shadow of approaching night on everything. If I had been murdered there in some former life I could not have seemed to remember the place more thoroughly or with more emphatic chilling of the blood; and the real remembrance of it acquired in that minute is so strengthened by the imaginary recollection, that I can hardly think I could forget it. 

"There was not much in it," Dickens says before sketching his word-picture. Yet we feel at once that this disclaimer is not to be trusted. The light over the scene is "blood red". What could be an idyllic scene of girls leaning over the parapet of a little bridge, as evening falls, fills the observer not only with the certainty that he has seen this before but with a crawling dread. If he had been murdered here in a past life, he insists, he could not have remembered the place "more thoroughly or with more emphatic chilling of the blood."
    Dickens clearly felt that he knew that scene near Ferrara because he had been there in a former life, perhaps a life than ended violently at that very place. A generic term we use for this kind of experience today is déjà vu. Dickens did not have that term. He was writing in 1846; déjà vu was first used to describe this phenomenon by a French professor in 1876, and only brought firmly into the English language in 1895.
     In any event, déjà vu ("already seen") may be too generic for the Dickens experience. This is an occasion where we want to reach for a different French term, déjà vécu. It literally means "already lived", and it speaks to the sense of recognizing a scene that you feel sure you have lived, fully and completely, in a previous time. This recognition generally comes with strong emotion, though it may be bittersweet nostalgia, or a sudden afflux of joy, even exultation, rather than Dickens' "chilling of the blood".
     You walked that cliff, you kissed on that bridge, you fought on that field of battle. You are sure of it. Maybe specific memories begin to stir. Are they buried memories of an episode from earlier in your present life? Are they ancestral memories, of members of your lineage or your spiritual kin who loved and struggled in the place you are at? Are they memories of a previous incarnation of your own spirit? Or are they false memories, hallucinations brought on by travel fatigue or an over-excitable temperament, or even inserted into your mind by some psychic deceiver?
    These are questions that all of us who experience a strong sense of déjà vécu are going to want to explore as best we can. There is a legion of reductionists - some armed with some neuroscience, some recycling Freud - that will tell us that our impressions are the effect of an imbalance in brain functioning or the bubbling up of repressed fantasies. But we can take heart from the knowledge that the sense of déjà vécu has a highly distinguished literary and historical pedigree.



Art: "Dickens' Dream" by Robert William Buss