Dreams and Dream Stories — Anna Bonus Kingsford
You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org . If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title : Dreams and Dream Stories Author : Anna Bonus Kingsford Release date : May 1, 2004 [eBook #5651] Most recently updated: December 29, 2020 Language : English Other information and formats : www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5651 *** START OF R.J. Dreams and Dream Stories By Anna (Bonus) Kingsford Contents Preface Part I Dreams I. The Doomed Train II. The Wonderful Spectacles III. The Counsel of Perfection IV. The City of Blood V. The Bird and the Cat VI. The Treasure in the Lighted House VII. The Forest Cathedral VIII. The Enchanted Woman IX. The Banquet of the Gods X. The Difficult Path XI. A Lion in the Way XII. A Dream of Disembodiment XIII. The Perfect Way with Animals XIV. The Laboratory Underground XV. The Old Young Man XVI. The Metempsychosis XVII. The Three Kings XVIII. The Armed Goddess XIX. The Game of Cards XX. The Panic-Struck Pack-Horse XXI. The Haunted Inn XXII. An Eastern Apologue XXIII. A Haunted House Indeed! XXIV. The Square in the Hand Dream Verses I. "Through the Ages" II. A Fragment III. A Fragment IV. Signs of the Times V. With the Gods Part II Dream Stories I. A Village of Seers II. Steepside; A Ghost Story III. Beyond the Sunset IV. A Turn of Luck V. Noemi VI. The Little Old Man's Story VII. The Nightshade VIII. St. George the Chevalier Preface* The chronicles which I am about to present to the reader are not the result of any conscious effort of the imagination. They are, as the title-page indicates, records of dreams, occurring at intervals during the last ten years, and transcribed, pretty nearly in the order of their occurrence, from my Diary. Written down as soon as possible after awaking from the slumber during which they presented themselves, these narratives, necessarily unstudied in style and wanting in elegance of diction, have at least the merit of fresh and vivid color, for they were committed to paper at a moment when the effect and impress of each successive vision were strong and forceful in the mind, and before the illusion of reality conveyed by the scenes witnessed and the sounds heard in sleep had had time to pass away. I do not know whether these experiences of mine are unique. So far, I have not yet met with any one in whom the dreaming faculty appears to be either so strongly or so strangely developed as in myself. Most dreams, even when of unusual vividness and lucidity, betray a want of coherence in their action, and an incongruity of detail and dramatis personae, that stamp ———————- * Written in 1886. Some of the experiences in this volume were subsequent to that date. This publication is made in accordance with the author's last wishes. (Ed.) ——————— them as the product of incomplete and disjointed cerebral function. But the most remarkable features of the experiences I am about to record are the methodical consecutiveness of their sequences, and the intelligent purpose disclosed alike in the events witnessed and in the words heard or read. Some of these last, indeed, resemble, for point and profundity, the apologues of Eastern scriptures; and, on more than one occasion, the scenery of the dream has accurately portrayed characteristics of remote regions, city, forest and mountain, which in this existence at least I have never beheld, nor, so far as I can remember, even heard described, and yet, every feature of these unfamiliar climes has revealed itself to my sleeping vision with a splendour of coloring and distinctness of outline which made the waking life seem duller and less real by contrast. I know of no parallel to this phenomenon unless in the pages of Bulwer Lytton's romance entitled—"The Pilgrims of the Rhine," in which is related the story of a German student endowed with so marvellous a faculty of dreaming, that for him the normal conditions of sleeping and waking became reversed, his true life was that which he lived in his slumbers, and his hours of wakefulness appeared to him as so many uneventful and inactive intervals of arrest occurring in an existence of intense and vivid interest which was wholly passed in the hypnotic state. Not that to me there is any such inversion of natural conditions. On the contrary, the priceless insights and illuminations I have acquired by means of my dreams have gone far to elucidate for me many difficulties and enigmas of life, and even of religion, which might otherwise have remained dark to me, and to throw upon the events and vicissitudes of a career filled with bewildering situations, a light which, like sunshine, has penetrated to the very causes and springs of circumstance, and has given meaning and fitness to much in my life that would else have appeared to me incoherent or inconsistent. I have no theory to offer the reader in explanation of my faculty, —at least in so far as its physiological aspect is concerned. Of course, having received a medical education, I have speculated about the modus operandi of the phenomenon, but my speculations are not of such a character as to entitle them to presentation in the form even of an hypothesis. I am tolerably well acquainted with most of the propositions regarding unconscious cerebration, which have been put forward by men of science, but none of these propositions can, by any process of reasonable expansion or modification, be made to fit my case. Hysteria, to the multiform and manifold categories of which, medical experts are wont to refer the majority of the abnormal experiences encountered by them, is plainly inadequate to explain or account for mine. The singular coherence and sustained dramatic unity observable in these dreams, as well as the poetic beauty and tender subtlety of the instructions and suggestions conveyed in them do not comport with the con