Colquhoun assigned such great importance to her dreams that they provided the source material for virtually all of her imaginative prose, much of her poetry, and a number of her paintings. Although the extent to which she relied on dreams for her raw material was unusual, the very fact of doing so was not: dreams have inspired artists and writers for centuries. However, during her lifetime, a revolution in the understanding of dreams took place. It is a legitimate question, therefore, to ask what she understood herself to be doing when recording and making use of her dreams in this way. When she dreamed, did she suppose that she was delving into her personal past and that her dreams could help her understand her fears and insecurities? Did she perhaps imagine that she was tapping into shared ancestral memories? Did she think that she was receiving spiritual illumination, maybe opening up channels of communication between physical and incorporeal worlds? Did she believe that she was traveling into ethereal territories, using faculties that were unavailable to her in the waking state? It is unlikely that she would have made use of her dreams in the ways she did had she thought that they held no intrinsic meaning—if they were, say, merely a by-product of her brain cells performing routine maintenance tasks while she slept, or if they were caused by indigestion. In this section, we discuss the reasons why her dreams assumed such significance in her life.
The primary reason was that she considered dreams to be an important method of acquiring occult knowledge. Such a view is not new. For the first four thousand years of recorded history, most people believed that dreams contained messages from the gods. Philosophers and skeptics might have quibbled or debated the details, but for the majority, dreams contained divine guidance and should, if possible, be acted upon. It is true that some dreams are so bizarre that one might wonder whether they came from demons rather than gods, and it is also true that some dreams, when acted upon, have led to personal, political, or military disasters, but this merely points to difficulties of interpretation. To mitigate this, priestly guidance was always available.32
During the Enlightenment, the growth of rationalism led to the decline of supernatural explanations for dreams. These were now condemned as superstition. It fell to occultists and astrologers to keep belief in the external origin of dreams and their prophetic nature alive. In fact, in the face of growing scientific opposition, occultists hardened their position, coming to define dreaming sleep as a privileged state. Rationality, it was claimed, was at its weakest during sleep. Sleep, therefore, is the time when we are closest to the gods and most receptive to godly messages.33
By the end of the nineteenth century, diverse theories about dreams were in circulation. The cultural environment of the Victorian period was sufficiently rich to support the rise of science and secularization while, at the same time, hosting a resurgence of magic and spiritualism. The intellectual context was the complex interface between established sciences such as physics; emerging sciences such as psychology; marginal sciences such as mesmerism; and supernatural and occult traditions. Some empirical scientists studied the role of memory, emotion, and sensory stimuli on dream content and rejected occult explanations. Others, such as those associated with the London-based Society for Psychical Research (founded in 1882 and numbering eminent physicists, philosophers, and psychologists among its members), while often rigorously skeptical by the standards of the day and even agnostic, were more prepared to accept the existence of telepathic and precognitive dreams, and even to undertake practical experiments with mediums in the hope of making contact with spirits.34 As far as the mechanisms underlying telepathic phenomena were concerned, new explanations represented little advance on the proposal first made in classical Greece that happenings in one place may be transmitted to another location by vibrations. Rather than “vibration,” however, Victorian theories were couched in contemporary vocabularies of electricity and magnetism and the ether physics that had dominated since Thomas Young demonstrated the wave properties of light in the early nineteenth century. Many noteworthy scientists of the Victorian period, such as Peter G. Tait and Balfour Stewart in their popular book The Unseen Universe; or, Physical Speculations on a Future State (1875), ascribed spiritual and mysterious properties to the ether. The former president of the Society for Psychical Research and eminent scientist Sir Oliver Lodge, author of the classic The Ether of Space (1909), continued to argue for the ether hypothesis well into the 1930s, after it had been abandoned by most physicists.
At the more magical end of the spectrum, members of the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn either remained largely untouched by mainstream developments in the physical sciences or turned to them to justify their occult convictions.35 These were the two most important occult societies established during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Theosophical Society was formed in New York in 1876 under the leadership of the Russian émigré H. P. Blavatsky and the American lawyer Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, who had distinguished himself as a member of the three-man commission charged with investigating the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The Golden Dawn, founded twelve years later, was based in London but also had temples elsewhere in the United Kingdom and in the United States and France. Members of these occult groups attempted to capitalize on the cognitive authority of science by quantifying and systematizing their learning in ways that resembled those of science. But most of them were opposed to scientific materialism, focusing instead on strictly nonrational methods of surrendering the self to occult forces. Freed from the physical body during sleep, they argued, the spirit is free to travel in nonmaterial, astral planes, meeting and conversing with other spirits. When the sleeper awakes, these journeys are remembered as dreams. This claim opened up the possibility that astral travel can be developed and taught. Perhaps astral meetings between two sleeping occultists could be prearranged, resulting in a shared dream. The Golden Dawn provided magicians with detailed instructions on “scrying in the spirit vision,” as they termed such practices. The astral meetings between two Golden Dawn initiates, W. B. Yeats and Maud Gonne, had the result that “their famous love affair, frustrated at mundane level, achieved a hidden consummation.”36
As a member of the Theosophical Society and one-time applicant to the Golden Dawn, Colquhoun absorbed these teachings. In the early 1950s, while studying for advancement in a Golden Dawn successor organization, the Ordo Templi Orientis, she summarized the multiple ways in which she believed the practicing magician might acquire magical knowledge during dreaming:
The night dream, when suitable, can be used for definite magical aims, either through the information it gives in symbolic terms[,] thereby helping to clarify the magical will, or through the initiation it confers [and] which gives the desire to know more. Guidance ([the] solving of problems [is] not perhaps definitely magical enough). [Other examples are] the pre-cognitive dream, the shared dream, the telepathic dream [and] the directed dream (induced by objects under the pillow). Suggestions taken from a dream can be used in magical ritual.37
Today, these ideas appear eccentric, but had Colquhoun been living in Babylon at the time of Gilgamesh, and had she inscribed her words in cuneiform on tablets of clay, they would not have raised an eyebrow. Her recommendation of placing an object under the pillow in order to influence the content of a dream derived directly from the technique of “dream incubation,” which was widely practiced in ancient Mesopotamia.38 Similarly, when she mentioned the “gates of horn”