A dream, as a channel for occult revelation or communication, while providing the dreamer with a route into the spirit world, also opens a channel in the reverse direction. The result may be more than the dreamer bargained for: spirits or demons may visit him or her, whether invited or not, and leave a mark of their presence on the dreamer’s astral body. This subsequently becomes imprinted on the physical body. The poem “Wedding of Shades” relates one of Colquhoun’s own experiences of this sort.
Contact, however, was more often verbal than physical. The name of the Parthenogenesist Order and the nature of its mission were revealed to Colquhoun in a dream of May 8/9, 1956. In a dream several years earlier, in 1942, she had heard a disembodied voice saying, “This is the grotto of the sun and moon, Nicaragua.” So strong was the impact of this message that she reflected upon its meaning for the remainder of her life. It inspired her to research the topography and archaeology of Nicaragua, where the dream grotto was evidently located, and it became the subject of the oil painting Grotto of the Sun and Moon (1952). She finally concluded that “the Grotto was an occult centre used by an eponymous order which existed in the past or still exists, either in that state of being commonly recognised as reality today, or else in regions variously called the Higher Worlds or the Inner Planes.” For some reason, she had been granted a glimpse of this mysterious center: “And now if I receive an idea or perception which does not seem to be a direct result of anything I have read, heard or thought, I take it to be a message from the Order.”39
The publication of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899 marked the beginning of a revolution in the study of dreams.40 Although Freud continued to recognize the traditional standpoint that dreams could provide helpful guidance for the dreamer, his reason for doing so was anything but traditional. In his view, it was not because of any divine source, the possibility of which he categorically rejected, but because dreams revealed the dreamer’s hidden fears, hopes, and desires. The information contained within the dream, however, was coded, disguised by subconscious censorship. This was why dreams were largely unintelligible to the dreamer. The expertise of a skilled interpreter was still required to understand them. This function was no longer to be fulfilled by a priest, as of old, but rather a psychoanalyst.
Freud’s materialistic view of the world explains his rejection of the existence of prophetic dreams and the spirit world, although he was still prepared to accept—even at the height of his professional eminence and albeit hesitantly—the possibility of telepathic dreams.41 His core belief that dreams were firmly rooted in an individual’s unconscious also caused him to reject the dramatic assertion by his colleague Carl Jung that some aspects of the unconscious are shared and common to all humanity. According to Jung, some dreams come from a region of the mind termed the “collective unconscious,” a depository of memories, images, and mythologies from the ancient past. Although they are largely forgotten at a conscious level by modern civilized Europeans, they may be accessible during sleep, when rationality is suspended. They reflect a natural wisdom deep within the human unconscious. They connect the dreamer with the past and provide insights that can give guidance along the path of self-development.
It is hardly surprising that some of Jung’s ideas, including suspended rationality and the shared unconscious, which he frequently expressed using the language and concepts of alchemy, found a receptive audience among many occultists. For several years during the 1950s, Colquhoun herself was associated with the London-based Buck Research Unit in Psychodynamics, run by Alice Buck, a Jungian psychotherapist. Although its duration is unclear, Colquhoun also underwent a period of psychotherapy with Dr. Buck, who was prepared to analyze her dreams by letter in addition to meeting with her in group therapy sessions. The Jungian context of the research unit is clear from Colquhoun’s brief account of its activities, “Divination Up-to-Date.” The research interests of the group included the extent to which shared dreams could be analyzed and used to predict natural or man-made disasters. Buck disagreed with occultists on some points and regarded shared dreams (which might include clairvoyant content) as instances not of astral travel but of two individuals “inter dreaming”—that is, simultaneously accessing an aspect of the shared unconscious. In 1950, Colquhoun and Buck experienced one such shared dream, consisting of geometrical forms, which were later used as the design for the dust wrapper of the book in which Buck gave her own account of the research unit’s activities.42
For his part, André Breton had no doubt as to the central role of dreams in the surrealist quest for truth. Basing many of surrealism’s investigatory methods on Freud and contemporary psychiatry (including the study of dreams and hallucinations, and the use of automatic writing and free association), Breton regarded it as a fundamental truth that the world of dreams and the waking world are but one; both are of equal importance, and each is as incomplete as the other. In place of the traditional viewpoint that treats dreaming and the waking state as opposites, Breton wanted to substitute reciprocity—hence the metaphor of communicating vessels that he developed in Les vases communicants (1932), the book that contains his most detailed discussion of dreams.43 Breton imagined existence as two interconnected containers, one being the dream state and the other the waking state. Because they are constantly connected to each other, they are in a state of equilibrium and material can flow freely in either direction.
Despite the enthusiasm that the surrealists showed for his work, Freud regarded some of Breton’s ideas as an almost unintelligible distortion of his own. For example, in an assertion that put him completely at odds with Freud’s position, Breton tried to show that space, time, and causality are identical in both dreams and reality. In other words, they are both objective states, rather than one (the dream) being no more than a subjective mental process. If Breton’s view is accepted, one consequence is that traditional views of time must be rejected. In material reality, anticipation of historic time is an impossibility. In psychic time, however, knowledge of the future in the present—or, indeed, multiple futures in multiple presents—is perfectly possible. Some Jungians also disagreed with Freud on this point. Alice Buck, for example, when attempting to explain predictive dreams, was content to accept that paranormal events occur outside of time as it is ordinarily understood. She believed that conventional linear time is a creation of consciousness that can be escaped during dreaming. In its place, she adopted the concept of “serial time,” in which the “future” in our three-dimensional world is simply the “now” viewed from elsewhere in a multidimensional world with infinite planes of existence.44
Time, as Breton put it, contains “the perfect continuity of the possible with the impossible.”45 Further, if there is no difference between dreamed representations and real perceptions, then the imaginary and the real are one and the same thing. The realization that the one-way flow of time is an illusion is a consequence of this. Ultimately, we can no longer tell which came first, as the difference is artificial. Additionally, it cannot matter at what rate, or in what order, images that are later seen to be connected are released into consciousness—nor, indeed, whether they are first perceived in the dreaming state, the waking state, or some combination of the two. It is this that makes it possible for certain dreams to prefigure episodes in waking life. It is this that allowed Breton to claim that his poem “Sunflower” was an accurate description of a person he had yet to meet (and whom he subsequently married),46 and Colquhoun, in I Saw Water, to compose a sequential narrative in which the constituent dreams had occurred over a period of many years and in no logical or temporal sequence. The novel was dreamed episodically, like a serial