“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep”
Shakespeare’s Prospero declares that in The Tempest. Figuring out exactly what it means is the task of a lifetime. So, we won’t do that, today.
But, what are dreams?
G.K. Chesterton’s The Coloured Lands is a collection of some of his early work. Stories, poems, musings, and doodles, all with that Chestertonian air of paradox embedded within. The book defies summary. Think of it as the flotsam and jetsam of a fertile imagination.
When Chesterton turns to the subject of dreams, in an essay cleverly entitled “Dreams,” we get five pages of reflection which one could spend many hours unpacking.
But, before we get to Chesterton, the biggest shock of this essay has to do with Neil Gaiman. In the substory The Doll’s House of Gaiman’s unbelievably amazing Sandman, none other than Gilbert Chesterton shows up to play a rather important role. Now Chesterton was one of Gaiman’s first loves in the literary realm (along with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien). What made Chesterton so important for Gaiman was this:
I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.
That is a wonderful description of Chesterton. But, it does not explain how he showed up in The Sandman. And suddenly reading The Coloured Lands, I know exactly how that happened.
[Note for those who have read Gaiman: throughout Chesterton’s book, there are assorted drawings, having nothing to do with the story right before or after. Just assorted doodles. The drawing on the facing page to the start of the essay on Dreams is a picture of Cain killing Abel!]
Chesterton begins the essay:
There can be comparatively little question that the place ordinarily occupied by dreams in literature is peculiarly unreal and unsatisfying. When the hero tells us that “last night he dreamed a dream,” we are quite certain from the perfect and decorative character of the dream that he made it up at breakfast. The dream is so reasonable that it is quite impossible.
Why impossible? After all, we constantly read tales of perfectly comprehensible dreams, inevitably with some obvious moral attached or easily attachable. Chesterton:
Dreams like these are (with occasional exceptions) practically unknown in the lawless kingdoms of the night. A dream is scarcely ever rounded to express faultlessly some faultless ideas.…Dreams have a kind of hellish ingenuity and energy in the pursuit of the inappropriate; the most omniscient and cunning artist never took so much trouble or achieved such success in finding exactly the word that was right or exactly the action that was significant, as this midnight lord of misrule can do in finding exactly the word that is wrong and exactly the action that is meaningless.
That is, if you think about your own dreams, exactly right. They really never make sense unless you iron out all the weird wrinkles. But the weird wrinkles are what makes it a dream. Dreams are weird…and terrifying.
In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis captures the difference between what we imagine when we think about dreams and what Dreams actually are. Sailing into a pitch black realm, the crew takes on board a man who was screaming for help. Once on board, the rescued man screams out:
“Fly! Fly! About with our ship and fly! Row, row, row for your lives away from this accursed shore…This is the Island where Dreams come True.”
“That’s the island I’ve been looking for this long time,” said one of the sailors. “I reckon I’d find I was married to Nancy if we landed here.”
“And I’d find Tom alive again,” said another.
“Fools!” said the man, stamping his foot with rage. “That is the sort of talk that brought me here, and I’d better have drowned or never born. Do you hear what I say? This is where dreams—dreams, do you understand—come to life, come real. Not daydreams: dreams.”
When you think about it, Descartes’ question of how you know you are not dreaming right now is really easy to answer. I know I am not dreaming right now because the world in which I am currently existing is perfectly comprehensible. I am typing on a computer in my office and I am not going to find myself in the next second standing on a rural road right after a parade next to an abandoned parking lot realizing my truck was stolen. And I am really certain that I won’t decide that because my truck was stolenI will instantly go to a junk dealer’s storefront to sell the following two items: 1) a baseball from some playoff game involving the Red Sox, signed by the entire team (I’ve never even seen such a baseball) and 2) a Hummel figurine of a little girl holding a flower (the exact one that my mother had). If you can’t see any connection between having your truck stolen and because of that selling two rather odd items to a junk dealer, that is the point. This is the sort of thing that happens in a dream…well not a dream, the last dream I can remember from a few nights ago.
The Lord of Dreams, that midnight lord of misrule, has a very odd sense of what constitutes continuity.
From this starting observation, Chesterton proceeds to consider the relationship of Dreams to Art. As he notes, “at first sight it would seem that the lord of dreams was the eternal opponent of art.” Dreams lack the cohesion necessary to be a work of art. They lack elegance and beauty.
But, Chesterton goes on to argue that first impression is wrong. The incoherence of dreams, that wild and unpredictable nature of them, is telling us something about Life. It is not telling us that Life is wild and unpredictable; we already know that from our hours of being awake. The wildness and unpredictability of the land of dreams is of a different kind than that which we see in the daytime.
So, what are dreams doing? And this is where Chesterton starts giggling with delight off behind the scenes of his essay. This is what Gaiman internalized when he set out to craft the tale of Dream.
There is one unity which we do find in dreams. It binds together all their brutal inconsequence and all their moonstruck anti-climaxes. It makes the unimaginable nocturnal farce which begins with a saint choosing parasols and ends with a policeman shelling peas, as rounded and single a harmony as some poet’s roundel upon a passion flower. This unity is the absolute unity of emotion. If we wish to experience pure and naked feeling we can never experience it so really as in that unreal land. There the passions seem to live an outlawed and abstract existence, unconnected with any facts or persons.
You wake from a dream in a cold sweat terrified like you are never terrified when awake; you awake with a sense of overwhelming peace and happiness; you awake with a terrible feeling of loss; you awake with a massive worry that you forgot to study for the test or you are late. All of these emotions are so strong at that moment of waking that either a) you are relieved to realize the bad emotions were generated by things that are not real, or b) you have that crushing disappointment that the good emotions were based on an unconscious fancy and you want more than anything to return to that dream world.
What is Life? Chesterton notes that is not merely what you read in a newspaper or see under a microscope. “Life dwells alone in our very heart of hearts, life is one and virgin and unconquered, and sometimes in the watches of the night speaks in its own terrible harmony.” That is how Chesterton concludes the essay. What does that mean? I am not entirely sure what it means, but I am pretty sure it is correct.
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