The horrors of Sleep

Hell? but whence came the descriptions of its Torments? From the imagination? But who having experienced what can be suffered in distempered Sleep, will compare the imaginative unsensational power of the man awake with the imagination that the Soul produces & suffers in Sleep?---One of the most horrible of these states of Morbid Sleep is the Sensation that counterfeits Remorse---& actual Remorse we know, when intense, realizes all the horrors of Sleep & seems indeed the identity or co-inherence of Sleep & Wake, Reality and Imagination.---If then Hell mean, & I know no more rational meaning, the state & natural consequences of a diseased Soul abandoned to itself or additionally tortured by the very organic case which had before sheltered it, and the force of the blows & blunted the point and edge of the daggers---it must contain---& surpass all the description of Hell, that were the portraits of the disturbed imagination---/---To consider the proper consequences an Act or Course of Action is to consider the Act itself, and no way inconsistent with the hatred of Sin for its own sake. 

Entry 4846, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 4: 1819-1826, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen, London: Routledge, 2002.

A sleep deeper than death

Ich brauche zu meinem Schreiben Abgeschiedenheit, nicht „wie ein Einsiedler“, das wäre nicht genug, sondern wie ein Toter. Schreiben in diesem Sinne ist ein tieferer Schlaf, also Tod, und so wie man einen Toten nicht aus seinem Grabe ziehen wird und kann, so auch mich nicht vom Schreibtisch in der Nacht. 

Franz Kafka, Brief an Felice Bauer, 26.vi.1926

I need isolation for my writing, not ‘like a hermit’, that would not be enough, but like a dead man. Writing in this sense is a sleep deeper than death, and just as one would not and could not drag a dead man out of his grave, so too I will not and cannot be dragged from my writing desk in the night.

Somnial or Morphean Space

Now I propose to note down the characteristics of Dreams, especially my infernal Dreams, as they occur to me—as so many parts of the Problem to be solved. [...]

    The first point of course is the Vision itself—that we see without eyes and hear without Ears.—

    The second (& which I have never seen noticed) is—that we live without consciousness of Breathing. You never suppose the Men & Women of the Dream to breathe—<you do not suppose them not to breathe>—the thought is wholly suspended—and absent from your consciousness. 

    The third concerns the qualities & relations of Somnial or Morphean Space— [...]

    The fourth is the spontaneity of the Dream-personages—Each is its own centre—herein so widely differing from the vivid thoughts & half-images of poetic Day-dreaming. —In sleep you are perfectly detached from the Dramatis Personæ—and they are from you.

    The 5th is the whimsical transfer of familiar Names and the sense of Identity and Individuality to the most unlike Forms & Faces. [...]

    6th. Conversion of bodily Pain into some passion of the Mind—Heart-burn becomes intense Grief, with bitter Weeping; Pain in the Umbilical Region becomes Terror [...]

    7th. Imaginary Air-piercing, Air-shooting, skimming, soaring by successive Jerks of Volition or rather a nisus-analogue of inward volition./

    8. & most interesting—the apparent representative character of particular Forms and Images, repr. I mean, each of some particular organ or structure—Ex. gr. I have never of later years awaked, desiderio mingendi*, but the preceding Dream had presented some water-landskip, Lake, River, Pond, or Splashes, Water-pits. [...]

    9. The frustration most common in Dreams.

    10. Non-descript & yet not composite Animals—the magnificent Fassades [sic] of Architecture. 

    11. The occasional sui generis Elysean Sunshine—/ 

 

Entry 5360, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 4: 1819-1826, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen, London: Routledge, 2002.

 * desiderio mingendi - with the urge to urinate

 

Dark reflections from below all life

Habitually to dream magnificently, a man must have a constitutional determination to reverie. This in the first place; and even this, where it exists strongly, is too much liable to disturbance from the gathering agitation of our present English life. Already, what by the procession through fifty years of mighty revolutions amongst the kingdoms of the earth, what by the continual development of vast physical agencies,—steam in all its applications, light getting under harness as a slave for man, powers from heaven upon education and accelerations of the press, powers from hell (as it might seem, but these also celestial) coming round upon artillery and the forces of destruction,—the eye of the calmest observer is troubled; the brain is haunted as if by some jealousy of ghostly beings moving amongst us; and it becomes too evident that, unless this colossal pace of advance can be retarded (a thing not to be expected) [...] left to itself, the natural tendency of so chaotic a tumult must be to evil; for some minds to lunacy, for others a reagency of fleshly torpor. How much this fierce condition of eternal hurry upon an arena too exclusively human in its interests is likely to defeat the grandeur which is latent in all men, may be seen in the ordinary effect from living too constantly in varied company. The word dissipation, in one of its uses, expresses that effect; the action of thought and feeling is consciously dissipated and squandered. [...]

 

Among the powers in man which suffer by this too intense life of the social instincts, none suffers more than the power of dreaming. Let no man think this a trifle. The machinery for dreaming planted in the human brain was not planted for nothing. That faculty, in alliance with the mystery of darkness, is the one great tube through which man communicates with the shadowy. And the dreaming organ, in connexion with the heart, the eye, and the ear, compose the magnificent apparatus which forces the infinite into the chambers of the human brain, and throws dark reflections from eternities below all life upon the mirrors of the sleeping mind. 

Thomas de Quincey, ‘Dreaming’, Suspiria de Profundis, 1845

Toad-imp whispers

26 April 1826. Wednesday Night. This Morning a little before three suffered one of my most grievous and alarming <Scream->Dreams—and on at length struggling myself awake found just such a focus of Ferment just above the Navel as if the Dæmon of Aqua Fortis had just closed in with the Genie Magnesia, or as if a Chocolate Mill were making a Water-spout dance a reel in dizzy-frisk.—It is strongly impressed on my mind, that I shall imitate my dear Father in this as faithfully as Nature imitates or repeats him in me in so many other points—viz. that I shall die in sleep […]
    Since I first read Swedenborg’s De Coelo et de Inferno ex Auditis et Visis, every horrid Dream, that I have, my thoughts involuntarily turn to the passage […] (indeed to the whole Book I am indebted for imagining myself always in Hell, i.e. imagining all the wild Chambers, Ruins, Prisons, Bridewells, to be in Hell)—Sunt Spiritus, qui nondum in conjunctione cum Inferno sunt: illi amant indigesta et maligna, qualia sunt sordescentium Ciborum in Ventriculo*—Swedenborg had often talked with them, and driven them away, & immediately the poor Sleeper’s frightful Dreams were removed, they being the spiritual Linguifacture of these Toad-Imps’ whispers. 

 

Entry 5360, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 4: 1819-1826, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen, London: Routledge, 2002.

 

* There are spirits that are not yet conjoined with Hell: they love things undigested and malignant such as befouled victuals in the belly.

Privy matters (3)

 —then the fantastic puppet-old-man that threw himself in my way and under my feet where ever I went—my intreatng some one to take him away—and a huge bloater fat fellow came & sat on him, saying, there was no other way—I went it—and a villainous little dog contrived to fly at me & bit me, with a sharp nip (the nearest imitation of proper pain, that I have found occur in sleep—Some one of the half-friendly Inhabitants of the Sleep-world observed, that the little old man had contrived to let the dog slip in the moment, the fat fellow sate on him—then the Drama of Puppets—& that I must stay it out before I could go to relieve myself—but I grew angry—& stole away down a hollow lane that led to a river, on the other side of which was a field or plot with a number of rather pretty yet fear-inspiring Child-men, with sheaves, as in a harvest field, of dry exceedingly light <Bean> Halms or the dried out Rushes in a dry summer ditch/ —I was on a sloping hillock or bank of the River—& said to myself—These are Tieck’s Fairies / alluding in my mind to the exquisite tale of the Girl who passed from Childhood to Womanhood among the Fairies & supposed she had been only a few hours / —and then a white-faced Boy came on the left of the harvest field but the other side of the Stream, as if to watch what I was about to do—and as I thought, to bring the natives about me, should I persist in profaning the place by letting down my small clothes— —& in this uneasy feeling I awoke—.. P.S. I had deferred taking my regular quantity of Mustard Seed till the moment, that I was undressing—three hours later than my wont—& in consequence, had to undergo all the process in sleep / But from these dreams (and no week occurs in which I have not one or two; always originating in the Kidneys, or Bladder, or Intestinal Canal) I derive convincing confirmation of the diversity between Reason & Understanding. The latter we retain in Dreams—it is “I” still, & the Understanding belongs to “I”—but Reason is a Loan, a Light.—The memory is lost: for it is objectivity that differences Memory from Fancy—and Objectivity, the offspring of Reason, is by divine ordinance connected with the Senses in our present fallen state—We have not God within; but must look out of ourselves for him.

 

Entry 5641, November 1827,  The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 5: 1827-1834, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Anthony John Harding, Routledge, 2002

An somnus mortis frater sit

As for Sleep, which the dying Philosopher called the Brother of Death,* I do not see how it argues the Soul’s Mortality, more than a man’s inability to wake again: but rather helps us to conceive, how that though the stounds† and agonies of Death seem utterly to take away all the hopes of the Soul’s living after them; yet upon a recovery of a quicker Vehicle of Air, she may suddenly awake into fuller and fresher participation of life than before. But I may answer also, that Sleep being only the ligation‡ of the outward Senses, and the interception of motion from the external world, argues no more any radical defect of Life and Immortality in the Soul, than the having a man’s Sight bounded within the walls of his chamber by Shuts, does argue any blindness in the immured party; who haply is busie reading by candle-light, and that with ease, so small a Print as would trouble an ordinary Sight to read it by day. And that the Soul is not perpetually employ’d in Sleep, is very hard for any to demonstrate; we so often remembring our reams merely by occasions, which, if they had not occurr’d, we had never suspected we had dream’d that night.

Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul (1659), Book III, Chap. xiv

* ὁ ὕπνος θανάτου ἀδελφὸς. Aelian, Var. Hist. lib. 2, cap. 35. With reference to pre-Socratic philosopher Gorgias Leontinus.

† stound - state of stupefaction or amazement

‡ ligation - condition of being bound, suspension (of the faculties)

The deities of dream

Offenser la pudeur des divinités du songe. (...) S'entretenir d'idées pures et saines pour avoir des songes logiques. Prenez garde à l'impureté qui effarouche les bons esprits et qui attire les divinités fatales. Quand vos rêves sont logiques ils sont une porte ouverte ivoire ou corne sur le monde extérieur.

Gérard de Nerval, feuillet détaché

To offend the modesty of the deities of dream. (...) To have to do with pure and healthy ideas in order to have logical dreams. Beware the impurity that frightens away the good spirits and brings down the fatal deities. When your dreams are logical they are an open portal of ivory or horn to the exterior world.

Hypnolatry / psychology

Once was a god whose lovely face,

Wan as the poppy and arched in wings,

So haunted a votary with his grace

And the still wonder that worship brings,

That, having sipped of Helicon’s springs,

He cast his beauty in bronze. And now

Eternal slumber bedims his brow —

Hypnos: and Dream was his dear son.

Not ours these follies. We haunt instead

Tropical jungles drear and dun,

And see in some fetish of fear and dread

Our symbol of dream — that brooding head!

And deem the wellspring of genius hid

In a dark morass that is dubbed the Id. 

Walter de la Mare, from ‘Dreams’, The Fleeting and Other Poems, 1933

Tenebrae exteriores

‘. . . that we mortals should dread the tomb—that’s only natural. And it’s when we are nearing the end that what may be called the real takes on another colour, sir. You look at those about you and can’t any more so surely rely on what they are, if you take me. As you once could. There is so thin a crust, sir, in a manner of speaking, between being awake and asleep—very fast asleep indeed. A sip of a doctor’s drug, and not only the lantern goes out but everything it shone on. I had that experience myself not more than a month or two since—only a decayed tooth, sir: outer darkness, and then the awakening. If that comes. It is like as if we were treading a flat fall of untrodden snow and suddenly it is thin ice—cat ice, as we used to call it when we were boys—and we are gone. Not, mind you, that the waters of death, however cold they may be, are not—well, the waters of life. Faith is faith. . . .’

 

Walter de la Mare,  ‘Strangers and Pilgrims’ (1936)

Suis-je celui qui rêve?

Chaque créature à son tour se trouve, tôt ou tard, avec plus ou moins de clarté, de continuité et surtout d’urgence, devant cette insistante question : suis-je celui qui rêve? Question aux aspects infinis, qui touche à nos raisons de vivre, aux choix que nous devons faire entre nos possibilités intérieures, au problème de la connaissance comme à celui de la poésie. (...) Est-ce moi qui rêve la nuit? Ou bien suis-je devenu le théâtre où quelqu’un, quelque chose, déroule ses spectacles tantôt dérisoires, tantôt pleins d’une inexplicable sagesse? Lorsque je perds le gouvernement de ses images dont se tisse la trame la plus secrète, la moins communicable, de ma vie, leur assemblage imprévu a-t-il quelque rapport significatif avec mon destin, ou avec d'autres événements qui me dépassent? Ou faut-il croire que j’assiste simplement à la danse incohérente, honteuse, misérablement simiesque, des atomes de ma pensée, livrés à leur absurde caprice?

Albert Béguin, L’Âme romantique et le rêve. Essai sur le romantisme allemand et la poesie française, Libraire José Corti, Paris, 1939

 

Every being in turn finds itself, sooner or later, with greater or lesser lucidity, continuity and, above all, urgency, faced with the pressing question: Am I the one who dreams? A question of endless facets, which touches on our very reasons for living, on the choices that we have to make between our inner potentialities, on the problem of knowledge and that of poetry alike. (...) Is it I who dreams at night? Or have I simply become the theatre where somebody or something stages performances that are now ridiculous, now filled with inexplicable wisdom? When I lose control of its images, from which is woven my life’s most secret, least communicable fabric, does their unexpected assembly have any significant relationship to my fate, or else other events that are beyond me? Or am I to believe that I merely witness the incoherent, shameful, wretchedly ape-like dance of my mind’s atoms, given over to absurd whim?

The way inwards (2)

På natten

 

Ett öga rullar över golvet, jag vrider mig inåt.

    Dörren är stängda läppar, lövet är tungt att bära.

Sakta växer hår och naglar in i tystnaden.

    Dörrens läppar är stängda för omvända värden.

Ingen blixt är hemma under drömmens ögonlock,

    Men nattens åska går i det fördolda.

 

Gunnar Ekelöf, Dedikation, 1934

At Night

An eye rolls over the floor, I turn inwards.

    The doors are closed lips, the leaf is heavy to bear.

Into the silence slowly grow hair and fingernails.

    The doors' lips are closed to obverse values.

No flash of lightning finds a home under the dream's eyelids,

    But night's thunder rolls in the hiddenness.

    

Tranced obedience to a dream

Who bade the scallop devise her shell?

Who tutored the daisy at cool of eve

To tent her pollen in floreted cell?

What dominie taught the dove to grieve;

The mole to delve; the worm to weave?

Does not the rather their life-craft seem

A tranced obedience to a dream?

Thus tranced, too, body and mind, will sit

A winter's dawn to dark, alone,

Heedless of how the cold moments flit,

The worker in words, or wood, or stone:

So far his waking desires have flown

Into a realm where his sole delight

Is to bring the dreamed-of to mortal sight. 

 

Walter de la Mare, from Dreams

The strange mine workings of the soul

. . . der Seelen wunderliches Bergwerk . . . Felsen waren da und wesenlose Wälder. Brücken über Leeres . . . 

. . . the strange mine workings of souls . . . Cliffs were there and spectral forests. Bridges over vacancies . . .

  

'"Orpheus. Euridice. Hermes" (...) has the quality of an uneasy dream, in which you gain something extremely valuable, only to lose it the very next moment. Within the limitation of one's sleeping time, and perhaps precisely because of that, such dreams are excruciatingly convincing in their details; a poem is also limited by definition. Both imply compression, except that a poem, being a conscious act, is not a paraphrase or a metaphor for reality but a reality itself. (...) a poem generates rather than reflects. So if a poem addresses a mythological subject, this amounts to a reality scrutinising its own history.'

Joseph Brodsky, 'Ninety Years Later' (Torö, Sweden, 1994), On Grief and Reason: Essays (1995)

The elementary life

 La nuit et le silence sont les deux gardiens du sommeil ; pour dormir il faut ne plus parler et ne plus voir. Il faut se livrer à la vie élémentaire, à l'imagination de l'élément qui nous est particulier. Cette vie élémentaire échappe à ce troc d'impressions pittoresques qu'est le langage. Sans doute, le silence et la nuit sont deux absolus qui ne nous sont pas donnés dans leur plénitude, même par le sommeil le plus profond. Du moins, nous devons sentir que la vie onirique est d'autant plus pure qu'elle nous libère davantage de l'oppression des formes, et qu'elle nous rend à la substance et à la vie de notre élément propre.

 Gaston Bachelard, L'Air et les Songes. Essair sur l'imagination du mouvement, Librairie José Corti, 1943

Night and silence are the two guardians of sleep; speech and sight must cease in order for there to be sleep. There must be a surrender to the elementary life, to the imagining of the element peculiar to us. This elementary life breaks free of the trade in pictorial impressions that is language. Without doubt, silence and night are two absolutes that are not given to us in their fullness, not even by the deepest sleep. Leastwise, we must feel that the oneiric life is the purer the more it releases us from the oppression of forms, and that it returns us to the substance and to the life of our own element.

A sev'rall world

 

ὁ Ἡράκλειτός φησι τοῖς ἐγρηγορόσιν ἕνα καὶ κοινὸν κόσμον εἶναι, τῶν δὲ κοιμωμένων ἕκαστον εἰς ἴδιον ἀποστρέφεσθαι

Heraclitus says that to the waking there is one world in common, but sleepers dwell each one in a several world.

Plutarch, De superstitione, 166c

 

Here we are all by day; by night w'are hurled

By dreams, each one into a sev'rall world. 

Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

 
 

Le rêve éveillé

[C]hez l'homme normal le rêve éveillé (ce grand méconnu) existe à l'état presque constant. Même pendant la conversation avec notre semblable, ou devant un beau spectacle, ou pendant que nous agissons, ou pendant que nous méditons ou, réfléchissons sur une question donné, sur un problème, même pendant le souvenir, le regret, le remords, il y a dans notre esprit une part important de rêves. Ces rêves et flocons de rêves — car il en est d'écharpillés et de baroques, comme parmi les rêves du sommeil — ont trait à des événements passés, à des visages disparus, à des paroles prononcées devant nous et qui ont eu, en nous, une résonance. (...) L'homme rêve constamment et baroquement, même à l'état de veille ; mais la présence et l'intégrité du jugement, joints aux spectacles du monde extérieur, lui masquent cette perpétuelle songerie. (...) Le rêve doit être ainsi considéré, selon nous, comme un passage continuel, à l'horizon mental, de lambeaux de souvenirs, d'images de toute sorte, elles-mêmes fragments de personnes héréditaires, d'éléments disparates et innombrables du moi ; et aussi de prémonitions, d'avertissements et d'intersignes d'une réalité indiscutable, dont le mécanisme nous est totalement inconnu.

Léon Daudet, Le rêve éveillé. Étude sur la profondeur de l'esprit, Bernard Grasset, Paris, 1926

For the normal person, the waking dream (which is so greatly misunderstood) exists almost permanently. Even when we are conversing with someone, or admiring a beautiful view, or doing something, or pondering or reflecting on a given issue, on a problem, even during remembrance, regret, remorse, there exists in our spirit a significant share of dream. These dreams and wisps of dreams — for they are tangled and baroque, the same as dreams during sleep — relate to past events, vanished faces, words spoken to us that have left their resonance in us. (...) A person dreams in a manner constant and baroque, even when awake; but the presence and wholeness of the judgement, combined with the sights of the outside world, mask this perpetual dreaming from him. (...) In our opinion, the dream should therefore be regarded as the continuous passage along the mind's horizon of shreds of memories, images of every kind, themselves scraps of hereditary persons, of the disparate and countless elements of the "I", and likewise of premonitions, warnings and forebodings of an indisputable reality, whose mechanism is wholly unknown to us. 

Phaenomena somni

 Il semble que l'esprit, offusqué des ténèbres de la vie extérieure, ne s’en affranchit jamais avec plus de facilité que sous le doux empire de cette mort intermittente, où il lui est permis de  reposer dans sa propre essence, et à l'abri de toutes les influences de la personnalité de convention que la société nous a faite. La première perception qui se fait jour à travers le vague inexplicable du rêve est limpide comme le premier rayon du soleil qui dissipe un nuage, et l'intelligence, un moment suspendue entre les deux états qui partagent notre vie, s'illumine rapidement comme l'éclair qui court, éblouissant, des tempêtes du ciel aux tempêtes de la terre. C'est là que jaillit la conception immortelle de l'artiste et du poète. C'est là qu'Hésiode s'éveille, les lèvres parfumées du miel des muses; Homère, les  yeux dessillés par les nymphes du Mélès ; et Milton, le cœur ravi par le dernier regard d'une beauté qu'il n'a jamais retrouvée. Hélas! où retrouverait-on les amours et les beautés du sommeil ! Otez au génie les visions du monde merveilleux, et vous lui ôterez ses ailes. La carte de l'univers imaginable n'est tracée que dans les songes. L'univers sensible est infiniment petit.

Charles Nodier, De Quelques Phénomènes du Sommeil (1831)

 It seems that the spirit, resentful of the darkness of the outward life, never frees itself therefrom with greater ease than under the gentle sway of this intermittent death, in which it is permitted to repose in its own essence, sheltered from all the influences of the conventional personality that society has made for us. The first perception that becomes visible through the unexplainable wave of dream is as limpid as the first ray of sunlight that scatters a cloud, and the mind, momentarily suspended between the two states that divide our life, is illumined as swiftly as the lightning that dazzingly courses from the tempests of heaven to the tempests of earth. It is then that the immortal conceit of the artist and the poet bursts forth. It is then that Hesiod awakes, his lips honeyed by the Muses; Homer, his eyes opened by the nymphs of Meles; and Milton, his heart enraptured by the last glimpse of a beauty never regained. Alas! where might we regain the loves and the beauties of sleep! Deprive genius of the visions of the world of marvel and you will deprive it of its wings. The map of the imaginable world is traced only in dreams. The perceptible world is infinitely small.

 

Somnia testificantur de futura vita

Somnia hoc distant a vita, quod phaenomena vitae sunt ordinata, et quod hinc sequitur universalia: neque enim mea satis ordinata essent, nisi alienis conspirarent. Quia tamen est aliquid in speciem inordinatum in hac vita, no physice quidem, sed moraliter, consentaneum est superesse aliam vitam, cui collata haec habet somnii instar, et morte nos evigilantes ad phaenomena demum pervenire, in quibus huic quoque perturbationi remedium afferatur, ubi praemia poenaeque corriget, quae in hac vita distorta videntur. 

Leibniz, c. 1698

Dreams are separate from life in that the phenomena of life possess an order and hence it follows that they are universal: for the phenomena of my life would not possess sufficient order unless they were in concord with the phenomena of others’ lives. Since in this life there nonetheless exists something lacking in order, not only physically, but also morally, it stands to reason that there is yet another life, compared with which this life has the appearance of a dream, and that awakening from death we at last arrive at phenomena wherein a remedy to this confusion is also brought about, where rewards and punishments will rectify those things that appear distorted in this life.

In somnio

[S]upposons qu'un homme songe fort longtemps; par exemple quelques années de suite, que pourroit il faire en ce temps; il ne pourroit pas lire dans les livres, ny chercher les plantes dans les champs, ny examiner les corps avec un microscope. Il ne pourroit même faire des experiences sur son corps; il ne luy resteroient que celles qui se peuvent faire sur l'espirt, or les experiences qui se peuvent faire sur l'esprit, ce sont elles, qui se font en examinant nos idées, et qui nous donnent des demonstrations en Geometrie, Arithmetique, Metaphysique.

Ainsi on m'avouera que celuy qui songe n'est capable d'autres verités que de celles qui se tirent de l'esprit même. Donc l'art d'inventer, et de perfectionner l'esprit en luy même, servant à tous les estats de l'ame, doit estre sur tout estimée. 

Leibniz, 1676