The Symbolism of Dreams

The same things we notice in the language of dreams, that tone of irony, that peculiar association of ideas and the spirit of prophecy, we find again, then, in a quite particular way, in the original of the dream world, in nature. In fact, nature seems quite of one mind with our hidden poet, and to mock together with him at our miserable pleasure and our pleasant misery, when now she laughs at us out of graves, now lets her laments of mourning be heard at wedding beds, and in this way strangely pairs lament with pleasure, gladness with mourning, like that voice of nature, the air-music on Ceylon, which sings fearfully merry minuets in the tone of a deeply lamenting, heart-rending voice. It is the time of love and joy when the nightingale lets her lamenting song be heard most, in which, as a poet has put it, she sings of the rose over graves; and all the songs of joy in nature have the lamenting minor key, while conversely an ephemeral winged creature celebrates the day of its wedding directly at the grave, on the day of its death. Death and wedding, wedding and death lie as near each other in the association of ideas of nature as in that of the dream; the one often seems to signify the other, the one to bring on or to presuppose the other; they often appear in the language of nature as two words of the same meaning, of which one is put for the other as occasion offers. The begetting and the last dissolution of bodies are, as has been remarked elsewhere,^* throughout nature immediately related and alike, both as to the appearances and as to the substances that come forth in them; Phosphorus is morning star as well as evening star, torch of the wedding and of death, and while the one part of the ever-turning wheel rises up to a new begetting, the other goes downwards in the same proportion. Pain and pleasure, pleasure and pain are made brothers in the same way: the child of joy is born with pains; upon the highest degree of sensual displeasure and torment there follows, even in the state of fainting and of apparent death, the highest pleasure;^** conversely, sensual pleasure is a bearer of pain.

* In the second volume of my Ahndungen einer allgemeinen Geschichte des Lebens, section 1.

** See the work just named, at the place cited.

That spiritual organ in man, in its two-sidedness, is the good and the evil daemon who accompanies man through life and, according as he has given more hearing to the one voice or the other, leads him to a happy or an unhappy end. The better (Socratic) daemon awakens in the soul the longing for the better, and punishes it, softly at first, but the more it gives him hearing the more audibly, for every action, every word, every thought that leads it away from the better end. This daemon is prophetic, and anyone who is acquainted with the guidings of the inner life will have experienced how often he warns us even before those occasions and opportunities behind which, still quite unknown to us, evil lies in wait for us, and preserves us with a higher power. We are not yet aware of any, not even the slightest, evil intention, and yet, when we come near the unknown danger, we feel an unrest, an anxiety, as after an evil deed accomplished. The Socratic daemon warns us of other, bodily dangers too. That pious clergyman goes out to visit the rocky hill near his dwelling, with its fine view. On the way the inner voice says to him: what are you doing here? Does a higher calling lead you here, or idle curiosity; is it right, too, that you are walking here? He stops, stands aside from the path under a wall of the hill, and considers, and even while he ponders, a piece of rock comes crashing down into the narrow footpath he has just left, which without that warning would infallibly have dashed him to pieces.^*

* Stilling’s Taschenkalender for 1808.

In the same prophetic way the good daemon leads us, with a kind of higher power, into situations in which we are able to do some good, and he makes use here of just that unrest, that anxiety, which are known to us as stirrings of conscience. Already undressed, and late at night, the venerable John Dod is driven by an irresistible unrest to visit a friend living about a mile away. All reasoning, all objections against the voice of the inner unrest, are of no help; he must set out. He finds his friend despairing, in the struggle of a deep anguish of conscience, close to suicide, and is given the opportunity of rescuing him from that anguish for ever.^** That official who lies sleepless on his bed on a stormy, rainy night also strives in vain to reason away, as reasonably as possible, the inner anxiety that would drive him out into the garden and from there into the fields. At last he must go out, and is given the opportunity of helping a boy, who is calling in vain for help, to save his father from death.^*** In the same way the one whom an inner unrest drives, at a very inconvenient time, to a ride out into the open becomes on this way the rescuer of several persons.^*

** Geschichte der Wiedergebornen.

*** Stilling’s Taschenkalender for 1809.

* See Hillmer’s Christliche Zeitschrift.

That course of development of language and knowledge, from its original standing in the divine love down to the present one of a stiffening on several sides, the well-known Swedenborg somewhere expresses very meaningfully, whose state was very like the deeper degree of the dream mentioned above, and differed from it only through its linking with the consciousness of waking.

“Once,” he tells, “when I was in conversation with a spirit who seemed to be saying memorable things in a state that resembled that of sleep, spirits came up to us who spoke among themselves, but neither the spirits round about me nor I understood what they were saying. I was taught that they were spirits from the globe of Mars, who could speak among themselves in such a way that the spirits present understood nothing of it. I wondered that there could be such a language, since all spirits have one language, which consists in the spiritual reproducing of ideas, which in the spiritual world are perceived like words. I was told that those spirits withdraw their thoughts from others, which they express in a certain way through the lips and the face, by keeping themselves artificially free of emotion and of the inner feeling of what they are saying. For since thought lives only from feeling, it can reveal itself to others only through feeling, and it stays closed to them when speech, as mere movement of the lips and the features, is unsouled and killed by the removal of the emotions. These are such inhabitants of Mars as place the heavenly life in knowledge alone, and not in the life of love; yet not all the inhabitants of that world are so. Those keep their dead language as spirits too. Yet however much they think themselves unintelligible to others, they are seen through in their most secret thoughts by the spirits of a higher order (those who have become angels). By these they were told that it is evil so to shut up the inward and to turn aside from it to the outward, chiefly because it is falsity to speak so, and lack of truth. For those who are true wish to speak and think nothing but what all, and the whole of heaven too, might know; those who do not wish this think well only of themselves and ill of others, at last even of the Lord. I was told that those who in such a way stand in knowledge alone and in no life of love, and who have accustomed themselves to speak without emotion, are like the hard skin stiffened into bone which encloses the centre of sensual life, the brain, without taking the least part in its emotions. They are spiritually dead, for only those have a spiritual life whose knowledge comes from heavenly love. And this knowledge, which is in infinite love, goes beyond all other knowledge; those who, as long as they lived in the world, stood in love know, when after death they come into heaven, and love things they never knew before; they think and speak like the other angels: things that no ear has ever heard, no heart has felt, which are unutterable.”

There are, however, other states closely related to somnambulism, during which that isolation continues just as otherwise in waking. Only here does the phenomenon show itself with particular clearness of two individualities wholly separated from each other, each well connected in itself, which are united in a wonderful way in one and the same person. The girl whose case history Er. Darwin^* tells fell regularly every other day into a state in which she was wholly insensible to the ordinary impressions of the senses of her surroundings, saw and heard nothing of what went on about her. She then conversed connectedly and full of spirit with absent persons whom she believed present, declaimed poems, and when sometimes a word failed her in declaiming, it was of no help however loudly and clearly those standing round prompted her; she had to find the missing word herself. When her hands were held she complained, without knowing what cause hindered her movements; likewise when her open eyes, staring before her, were covered. When she woke from that state she was startled, and knew nothing more of all that had gone on with her. She was now, until the alternate day on which the reverie came on again, the same as she had been before. Not without some appearance of truth, the women friends who visited her maintained that she had two souls, which spoke out of her by turns. In the quite similar case too which Gmelin^* describes, the patient fell by turns into a state in which she took herself for quite another person, for a French émigrée, and tormented herself with a misfortune she had dreamed up. She then spoke French, or broken German, and at first even with difficulty; she took her parents and the friends present for unknown visitors who were taking part in her unhappy lot, could remember absolutely nothing that had any relation to her waking and true personality, but showed for the rest a more than ordinarily heightened activity of mind. On waking she knew nothing of all that she had done and said in that invented personality, but she did remember clearly everything that had happened to her in the whole series of those states as soon as she fell into one again. Both states were therefore connected in themselves, but each out of connection with the other.

* Zoonomia II, and in Reil’s Rhapsodien über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrüttungen, p. 81.

* Materialien für die Anthropologie I, and Kluge, at the place cited, p. 180.