In the past I do not recall dreams as a frequent factor in my existence, though some affected me very importantly. As a child I used to have a sort of geometrical nightmare as if a mad kaleidoscope charged down upon me, and this was accompanied by intense distress. I may have been very young then, because I cannot remember how I awakened or whether I conveyed my distress to anyone. Nor have I ever come upon a description of that dream as happening to any other child.
But I remember a considerable number of quite frightful dreams that came before my teens. I read precociously, and I was pursued implacably, to a screaming and weeping awakening, by the more alarming animals I read about. An uncle from the West Indies described some frightful spiders that scratched and crawled. I was then put to bed alone in the dark in the upstairs bedroom of a strange house, and I disgraced myself by screaming the house down.
I had horror dreams of torture and cruelty. One made me an atheist. My mother was a deeply religious woman, but she did her best to conceal the Devil from me; there were pictures in an old prayer-book showing hell well alight, but she obliterated these with stamp paper which I was only partially successful in removing, so that until I held the page up to the light, hell was a mere suspicion. And one day I read a description in an old number of CHAMBER’S JOURNAL of a man being broken on the wheel over a slow fire, and in my sleep it flared up into immeasurable disgust. By a mental leap which cut out all intermediaries, the dream artist made it clear that if indeed there was an all powerful God, then it was he and he alone who stood there conducting this torture. I woke and stared at the empty darkness. There was no alternative but madness, and sanity prevailed. God had gone out of my life. He was impossible.
From that time on, I began to invent and talk blasphemy. I do not like filth. Merely dirty stories disgust me, and when sexual jokes have an element of laughter in them almost always it is dishonouring and cruel laughter. But theology has always seemed to me an area for clean fun that should do no harm to any properly constituted person. Blasphemy may frighten unemancipated minds, but it is unbecoming that human beings should be governed by fear. From first to last I have invented a considerable amount of excellent blasphemy. ALL ABOARD FOR ARARAT is the last of a long series of drawings and writings, many of which have never seen and probably never will see the light of print. There must be lingering bits of belief in order to produce the relief of laughter, and such jests may fade out very rapidly at no very distant date.
Only a few other dreams stuck in my memory before I discovered the Happy Turning, and mostly they were absurd and misleading freaks of fantasy. I dreamt my mother was ill and in great distress and wrote off post haste to her. There was nothing at all the matter with her.
I must have had anxiety dreams when I was over-working, in which everything was at sixes and sevens, I must have had them because I devised a technique for dealing with them. Directly I woke up, I got up and dismissed them. I trained myself to make tea and set to work soberly in a dressing-gown, and soon everything fell back into its place and the disturbance succumbed to fatigue and natural sleepiness. My friend J. W. Dunne, who wrote AN EXPERIMENT WITH TIME, lost himself for a time in a Serial Universe and has come back a most delightful writer of fantastic tales, induced me to keep a notebook at my bed-head and jot down my dreams fresh and hot. I do not remember making a note. I just woke up, and whatever dreams may have been hanging about vanished unimportantly forthwith.
So my present resort to dreamland is a new experience. I am a happy explorer telling of a delightful world he has come upon, beyond expectation.
III
COMPENSATION BEYOND THE HAPPY TURNING
THE SCENERY OF my dreamland is always magnificent or exquisite or otherwise delightful. I should not note it if it were not, and I find dear and delightful people I had never hoped to see again, happy and welcoming. Sometimes they are just themselves for a time, sometimes they are agreeably blended with other people, and at any moment they may see fit to impersonate someone else and cease to be whatever they began by being.
Nobody is dead in this world of release, and I hate nobody. I think that this absence of hate may be very recent. It may be due to my subconscious revolt against the unavoidable hates, disputes, suspicions and conflicts of our daily life in this war. Or it may be that with advancing years a mellowing comes to the mind with the attenuation of ambitions and rivalries. They matter so little at seventy-seven. Both factors, the normal one and this abnormal one of war conditions, may be contributing to my escape.
My waking life is now one of very fierce and definite antagonisms. I feel that the generations ahead may be cheated of much or all of the huge emancipations that could and should follow upon this world storm of fighting; and that ancient and evil organizations and traditions and the necessity common minds are under to believe they have natural inferiors, of whom they are entitled to take advantage, may frustrate all our hopes. I am compelled to spend my utmost energy in warfare against these things.
Dreamland is in flat contradiction to all this distressful strain. Nothing of these conflicts pursues me beyond the Happy Turning. At the Happy Turning is a recognizable Holy Water Stoup which has somehow identified itself with Truth, and in my Dreamland there is not the slightest difficulty about dipping a finger and sprinkling the Holy Catholic Church, or whatever ugly menace to mankind happens to be upon my heels, with it. Whereupon the evil I fear and fight here with all my strength, explodes with a slightly unpleasant odour, and vanishes. Why did I let my heart be troubled? Why was I afraid?
IV
THE HOLY CARNIVAL
NOTHING DISTRESSFUL TO me can clamber over that Threshold now. But anything and everything that shows me deference may play its part in my relaxation. I have had some very entertaining divine conferences. The gods men worship are difficult to assemble and impossible to count, because of their incorrigible habit of dissolving spasmodically into one another. I have remarked already upon the permutations and combinations, if those words are permissible, of Isis, the original Virgin Mary. Cleopatra’s infinite variety was nothing to it. The tangle of the Trinities is even more fantastically versatile. There is the Athanasian Trinity and the Arian Trinity, the Catholic and the Orthodox, the Logos and that ever ambiguous Virgin. There is the Gnostic Godhead, which makes Jehovah out to be the very Devil, and Pope’s consolidated Deity:
“Father of all, in every age
in every clime adored,
By Saint, by Savage and by Sage,
Jehovah, Jove or Lord.”
The vast theogony galumphs about in an endless confusion of identities with a stern transcendent solemnity that never deserts it. “Which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.”
A few such cries are uttered with an air of profound significance; a considerable amount of thunder goes on, a crackle of miracles, but never a laugh. To laugh is to awaken.
And in and out and round about this preposterous dance of the divinities, circulates an innumerable swarm of priests and prophets and teachers, wearing the oddest of robes and garments, mitres, triple crowns, scarlet hats, coquettish hoods. No Carnival gone mad can compare with this insane leaping and tumbling procession. They pour endlessly through the streets of my dreamland; striking strange symbolic attitudes, some with virgin beards, some grotesquely shaven and shorn, hunchbacked with copes, bellowing strange chants, uttering dark sayings—but always incredibly solemn. They tuck up their petticoats, these grave elderly gentlemen, and one, two, three, leap gulfs of logic.
I noted the present Primate, chief now of the English order of primates, his lawn sleeves like the plump wings of a theological Strassburg goose, as, bathed in the natural exudations of a strenuous faith, he pranced by me, with the Vatican a-kicking up ahind and afore, and a yellow Jap a-kicking up ahind old Pope. I had a momentary glimpse of the gloomy Dean, in ecstatic union with the Deity, yet contraceptive as ever, and then, before I could satisfy a natural curiosity, a tapping delirium