Dream Passage of the Day

"I suddenly dreamt that I picked up the revolver and aimed it straight at my heart - my heart, and not my head; and I had determined beforehand to fire at my head, at my right temple. After aiming at my chest I waited a second or two, and suddenly my candle, my table, and the wall in front of me began moving and heaving. I made haste to pull the trigger.

In dreams you sometimes fall from a height, or are stabbed, or beaten, but you never feel pain unless, perhaps, you really bruise yourself against the bedstead, then you feel pain and almost always wake up from it. It was the same in my dream. I did not feel any pain, but it seemed as though with my shot everything within me was shaken and everything was suddenly dimmed, and it grew horribly black around me. I seemed to be blinded and benumbed, and I was lying on something hard, stretched on my back; I saw nothing, and could not make the slightest movement."
Fyodor Dostoevsky - "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man"
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"'You had a cyclic self-containing dream - I suppose you could call it that. You dreamed you were dreaming you were dreaming. You know what your trouble is?'

'Well?'

'You're not sure you're awake now.'"
Henry Kuttner - "Dream's End"​
 
After some heavy drinking, I fall easily into a sleep so deep that I remain unconscious of my dreams. To know you are dreaming when (on the face of it) you are not dreaming is inextricable from knowing that any period of sleep is a Variant Senility Disease (VSD) affecting us all, even when we are new-born babies or 'foetuses and beyond'.

A single period of otherwise broken sleep – broken, for example, by prior over-indulgence – often allows you to glimpse the true nature of your condition from the vantage point of an observer who is independent of you, but an observer suffering from your VSD. So, after a day obsessively reading about the global banking crisis, I spend hours drowning my sorrows followed by an imperceptible slippage into further hours (in hindsight) watching abstractions that focus in and out of existence like the sporadically poor reception of a digital TV signal. The monstrous margins between each abstraction appear to be constructed from complex financial instruments of leverage and derivative in the form of spiky vegetation disguised as a hybrid of man-made barbed-wire and natural undergrowth.

My memory of all this – a memory equally as complex in nature as the derivatives themselves – also contains dream images that keep joining and unjoining as they continue even into the very ‘forgetting processes’ that often follow full waking ... beyond the reach of any further breaking and mending that can be mistaken as waking ... accompanied not by the normal thumping headache eating you from within but by the prickly crown-of-thorns eating you from without.
D. F. Lewis -"Derivatives"
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"7.12 a.m. Charles Ogilvy writes down a dream on the bedside telephone pad (E 159). He has dreamed of sailing down the Nile, a journey he and his wife made three years earlier, but in his dream the great temples and pyramids have been replaced by film sets..."
J. G. Ballard - "Running Wild"
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All day Richard Wilder had been preparing for his ascent. After the noise-filled night, which he had spent calming his sons and his giggling wife, Wilder left for the television studios. Once there, he cancelled his appointments and told his secretary that he would be away for the next few days. While he spoke, Wilder was barely aware of this puzzled young woman or his curious colleagues in the nearby offices - he had shaved only the left side of his face, and had not changed his clothes since the previous day. Tired out, he briefly fell asleep at his desk, watched by his secretary as he slumped snoring across his unread correspondence. After no more than an hour at the the studios, he packed his briefcase and returned to the high-rise.

For Wilder, this brief period away from the apartment building was almost dreamlike in its unreality. He left his car in the parking-lot without locking it and walked towards the entrance, a growing sense of relief coming over him. Even the debris scattered at the foot of the building, the empty bottles and garbage-stained cars with their broken windscreens, in a strange way merely reinforced his conviction that the only real events in his life were those taking place within the high-rise."
J. G. Ballard - High-Rise
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"Jim had begun to dream of wars. At night the same silent films seemed to flicker against the wall of his bedroom in Amherst Avenue, and transformed his sleeping mind into a deserted newsreel theater. During the winter of 1941 everyone in Shanghai was showing war films. Fragments of his dreams followed Jim around the city; in the foyers of the department stores and hotels the images of Dunkirk and Tobruk, Barbarossa and the Rape of Nanking sprang loose from his crowded head."
J. G. Ballard - Empire of the Sun
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"A grove of wild myrtle ran down to the narrow strip of sandy clay. I rubbed the oil from my arms, breathing the thick scent of desert lavender. Fan-palms and slender saplings of bamboo formed a cool waterside garden, an arbour filled with succulents and passion-flowers. I walked through this charming glade, placing my bare feet between the aloes and armoured rosettes of century plants that sprang from the damp floor. Nourished by the river, a vivid new flora had emerged in the past months, a cool realm that extended a hundred yards into the parched savanna. Curious tubers and corms, scarlet drupes, and culinary and medicinal herbs grew in the pale light, and I saw the yellow tubes and flared mouths of fragrant datura, their alkaloids promising drowsy potions on which the river might dream. As I looked down at the hundreds of green shoots rising between the saplings I seemed to be witnessing the birth of the flowering plants, which had brought colour and scent to the sombre world of the ferns and cycads."
J. G. Ballard - The Day of Creation
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"For the time being, I had a far more important death on my mind. Turning my back on the pool, and the white ship with its sinister lanterns, I kicked aside the poisoned snake that lay at the foot of the barrage. The wake from Noon's skiff sent a sluggish eddy across the river. Backed up above the rocky cascade, the waters of the Mallory had almost ceased to flow, their dark surface covered with an opaque scum. Damped by this satin cloak, the ripples from Noon's craft reached my feet like a series of vague afterthoughts, as if the damming of the Mallory, the containment of a dream, had held back time itself."
J. G. Ballard - The Day of Creation
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"As the wide sheets of water contracted, first into shallow lagoons and then into a maze of narrow creeks, the wet dunes of the lakebed seemed to emerge from another dimension. On the last morning he woke to find the houseboat beached at the end of a small cove. The slopes of mud, covered with the bodies of dead birds and fish, stretched above him like the shores of a dream."
J. G. Ballard - The Burning World
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"He remembered the iguanas braying and lunging across the steps of the museum. Just as the distinction between the latent and manifest contents of the dream had ceased to be valid, so had any division between the real and the super-real in the external world. Phantoms slid imperceptibly from nightmare to reality and back again, the terrestrial and psychic landscapes were now indistinguishable, as they had been at Hiroshima and Auschwitz, Golgotha and Gomorrah."
J. G. Ballard - The Drowned World
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"Kerans stared at the two clock towers jutting up like white obelisks above the fern fronds. The yellow air of the noon high seemed to press down like a giant translucent counterpane on the leafy spread, a thousand motes of light spitting like diamonds whenever a bough moved and deflected the sun's rays. The obscured outline of a classical portico and colonnaded facade below the towers suggested that the buildings were once part of some municipal centre. One of the clock-faces was without its hands; the other, by coincidence, had stopped at almost exactly the right time - 11-35. Kerans wondered whether the clock was in fact working, tended by some mad recluse clinging to a last meaningless register of sanity, though if the mechanism were still operable Riggs might well perform that role. Several times, before they abandoned one of the drowned cities, he had wound the two-ton mechanism of some rusty cathedral clock and they had sailed off to a last carillon of chimes across the water. For nights afterwards, in his dreams, Kerans had seen Riggs dressed as William Tell, striding about in a huge Dalinian landscape, planting immense dripping sundials like daggers in the fused sand."
J. G. Ballard - The Drowned World
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"His dark eyes were somber at the memory. 'I dreamed that I was a snake. Yes, I dreamed that I was crawling on my belly across the floor. I don't remember how far I crawled, or where I went. But when I awoke, Ruptar was coiled tightly about me, and his head rested against my cheek.

'He seemed to sense a - a kinship. He uncoiled when I spoke to him, but reluctantly.'"
Frank Belknap Long - "Carnival of Crawling Doom"
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"It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played upon a sleeping memory and won the fevered interest of my uncle. There had been a slight earthquake tremor the night before, the most considerable felt in New England for some years; and Wilcox's imagination had been keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, "Cthulhu fhtagn."
H. P. Lovecraft - "The Call of Cthulhu"
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"Beyond the lagoon the endless tides of silt had begun to accumulate in enormous glittering banks, here and there over-topping the shore-line, like the immense tippings of some distant gold-mine. The light drummed against his brain, bathing the submerged levels below his consciousness, carrying him downwards into warm pellucid depths where the nominal realities of time and space ceased to exist. Guided by his dreams, he was moving backwards through the emergent past, through a succession of ever stranger landscapes, centred upon the lagoon, each of which, as Bodkin had said, seemed to represent one of his own spinal levels. At times the circle of water was spectral and vibrant, at others slack and murky, the shore apparently formed of shale, like the dull metallic skin of a reptile. Yet again the soft beaches would glow invitingly with a glossy carmine sheen, the sky warm and limpid, the emptiness of the long stretches of sand total and absolute, filling him with an exquisite and tender anguish.

He longed for this descent through archaeopsychic time to reach its conclusion, repressing the knowledge that when it did the external world around him would have become alien and unbearable."
J. G. Ballard - The Drowned World
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"'No doubt the iguana would prefer us. All right then, that seems pretty fair. Alan will be over in the station until the level rises, and I'll be holding out at the Ritz. Anything else?'

Beatrice wandered away around the sofa towards the bar. 'Yes, darling. Shut up. You're beginning to sound like Riggs. The military manner doesn't suit you.'

Kerans threw her a mock salute and strolled over to look at the painting by Ernst at the far end of the lounge, while Bodkin gazed down at the jungle through the window. More and more the two scenes were coming to resemble each other, and in turn the third nightscape each of them carried within his mind. They never discussed their dreams, the common zone of twilight where they moved at night like the phantoms in the Delvaux painting."
J. G. Ballard - The Drowned World
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THE KING. Y'are an honest man. Listen, I had a dream.
I saw a creature run about the world,
everywhere at all times, that would be caught
but would not stay for catching, or mayhap
the thing was still, it was everything else ran by,
and I ran also, too slowly or too fast ;
sometimes I could see, sometimes I could not see,
but when I saw I wept for the joy of it -
a crimson flashing creature, full of power.
All my life I sought for it, and then I died,
and it was gone and everything was gone,
except a voice calling. Where is the prey,
King of England ? but I was not the King: It called
Henry, where is the prey ? but I was not Henry.
In the nothingness, for the creature was not, I stood
and answered: I - and before I added more
the nothingness broke over me in a peal
of laughter, all the angels crying You ! -
Here is a fellow calls himself I, - and their mirth
filled me, but I was weeping ; and there were streams
of mockery running to misery ; and I woke,
the tears upon my cheeks, and the chamberlains trembled
beside me, hearing me roaring in my sleep.
What did I say that was wrong - am I not I ?
am I not I myself ? what did this mean ?
CRANMER. Sir, I do not know.
THE SKELETON. You will know.
[ to the audience ] So will you.


from Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury by Charles Williams
 
"Watching her, and thinking of Delvaux's 'Echo', with its triplicated nymph walking naked among the classical pavilions of a midnight city, Halliday wondered whether he had fallen asleep on the warm concrete roof. Between his dreams and the ancient city below there seemed no boundary, and the moonlit phantoms of his mind moved freely between the inner and outer landscapes, as in turn the dark-eyed woman from the house by the drained river had crossed the frontiers of his psyche, bringing with her a final relief from time."
J. G. Ballard - "The Day of Forever"
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"Ten feet from me the sand glittered with silver light, a dissolving mirror leaking into the river. A gondola of the ferris wheel lay in the shallow water among the Edwardian pillars. Dislodged by the night's storm, a section of Stark's amusement pier had collapsed into the river, carrying part of the merry-go-round with it. A small winged horse lay among the debris on the wet beach.

I remembered my dream and the bodies of the frantic birds colliding above the fairground as they scrambled around me in the whirling air. Soon after dawn the river had disgorged this antique Pegasus onto the same beach where I had swum ashore. I approached the horse and pulled it onto the bank. The fresh paint silvered my hands, leaving a speckled trail across the sand.

As I wiped the paint onto the grass, the pelicans watched me from the flower beds. The same vivid light flared from their plumage. The foliage of the willows and ornamental firs seemed to have been retouched by a psychedelic gardener with a taste for garish colours. A magpie swooped across the overlit lawn, feathers brilliant as a macaw's."
J. G. Ballard - The Unlimited Dream Company
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Ernesto Sábato, from "Uno y el Universo", (1945)


BERKELEY

When Dr. Johnson felt that the bishop's arguments were getting him into trouble, he decided to settle the matter quickly and decisively, following the accredited way of the English pragmatists: he kicked a stone and exclaimed:

"I refute you that way.

This way he thought to certify that the stone was not a perceptual ghost. But can't Berkeley's stones be kicked? While dreaming we can also kick a stone.

I am not interested in saving Berkeley but, in prestige of intelligence, I request better arguments.​
 
Bertrand Russell's Dream


I can remember Bertrand Russell telling me of a horrible dream. He was on the top floor of the University Library, about AD 2100. A library assistant was going round the shelves carrying an enormous bucket, taking down book after book, glancing at them, restoring them to the shelves or dumping them into the bucket. At last he came to three large volumes which Russell could recognize as the last surviving copy of Principia Mathematica. He took down one of the volumes, turned over a few pages, seemed puzzled for a moment by the curious symbolism, closed the volume, balanced it in his hand and hesitated. . . .


G. H. HARDY, from "Fantasia Mathematica", edited by Clifton Fadiman, published by Simon and Schuster, 1958.
 
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