Dream Series

Dream series of about 20 dreams occurring one after the other within about an hour. Dreamt after being drunk about 2 days, the aftermath of being drunk leaving me in a mentally indigestible position, as if lost in a desert or being frozen to death. Notes written down immediately after waking, 3 to 4 a.m.

Unusual factors: – The dreams occurred like a chain-reaction, one leading on to another, moving towards a primitive layer of thought and feeling. That I retained the faculty while asleep to interpret them; indeed, a dream would be presented again and again until I had solved it, then a different kind of dreampage 19 would put forward another problem. I find a little now, and found much more on waking, a very strong revulsion from making the notes, amounting to a negative compulsion.

• (1) The series begins with me high up in the air, in a town rather like Dunedin. I can swim through the air as if on huge stilts. My remoteness from other people makes me very lonely and chilled. I am frightened that I will float away from the warm, rich world, and be frozen against the stars. A number of dreams occur in which I am in this state, while I am drinking with friends or visiting the wharves. The sea is stormy and the night wild. My friends say I drink too much and I say, What of it?
• (2) Somewhere in this series, I leave 2 rabbits in a cage. When I return one has died or been eaten by the cat. The remaining one is thin and bedraggled. It tells me how terrible it was to see the large sleek black cat eating its companion, while it waited hopelessly for me to return.
• (3) I came down from the air to the street. Immediately I am surrounded by brutal jeering faces. I think I am accompanied by Y— my girl-friend. There is a scaffold prepared with what I conclude to be castrating implements. I spit at the eyes of the enemies? They close in on me in a ring.
• (4) The dream most horrible to me. I am sitting with Y—, on a bed, and her face takes on the expression of a she-devil. A face of malignant hostility. She says that she is ‘dead sick of me’, will have nothing more to do with me. Her eyes are green, she seems full of energy and hostile toward me.
• (5) I return and find Y— in a mummified condition, long dead. A great sense of loss and tragedy. I weep and make the intellectual decision that I have destroyed her by not loving her as a person but as a sex-object, by trying to found on sensation what should be founded on emotion. She then revives and becomes the Y— I know, promising to be my friend, as I have now chosen the Christian rather than the pagan view. Perhaps Y— is the woman-figure who recurs throughout the series.
• (6) I am determined to find out Why the central horror? – a horror recognisably the same as in all my threatening dreams and in times of waking depression. Though sick with fear, I am not helpless, but return again and again to the danger-point. Each time a small crocodile rushes at me with open jaws, becoming huge as it approaches. Note that the crocodile is a water- animal, as if guarding something in a pool.
• (7) A gypsy woman who is crystal-gazing is helpful to me.
• (8) I reach a childhood layer (the ground-floor or basement of a house) and find the Authorities who direct the series there very flustered. They are as upset as people would be if the automaton in a puppet show suddenly demanded to know what the play was about. Doctor Johnson (one of them) appears and tells I should go on with academic work. He is irritated with my pressing. I say, How can I work without first finding out what I need to know so urgently – the nature of the central horror. page 20
• A Young Man with a dark shiny face, powerful and helpful, says to me that They could not possibly allow any of this to happen if I were not able to analyse the dreams as I dreamt them. (I realised that the Authorities existed in their own right, as opposed to the dream symbols in which each problem was presented, like a nut which I had to crack until the kernel was presented as a new nut. My shock tactics went against the grain of the dreams and even of the Authorities.) The Young Man makes again and again statements which I have to comprehend, i.e. make a semi-conscious synthesis of them. His remarks are always unexpected and lucid.
• The Guiding Woman gives me the words ‘Red Lamp’ or ‘Red Lights’ as a clue or key to the next compartment which I enter alone. I imagine this may mean a brothel.
• (9) I find myself outside a door, as in dreams which I used to have at about five years old. As usual I feel sick with terror, but I force myself to open it nevertheless. I realise that the horror is not in the images but as it were in the empty space electrically charged which they clothe. I open the door. In the dusk inside is a big angry pale Scottish Highlander (my ancestors were Highlanders, hence he is highly primitive). In spite of his anger I go on, like pressing up a stream to its source.
• (10) I find myself with head and shoulders wedged inside a red-lit cave, my body from below the waist still outside. There is red velvet round about. This seems the end of the search, and I have a feeling of having partially achieved my object.
• (11) I return to the Guiding Woman, who tells me I must wait. I press her to find out more, but the feeling of urgency has lessened greatly. She says she will find out what I want to know from the Theatre later on. This is the last dream in the series.

All the dreams seem to be unusually vivid and important. I am as it were taking heaven by storm. . . .

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