Chapter 16

Now what do we mean by personalities? Is one, after all, anything more or less than an individualized aggregate of cosmic vibrations, physical and psychical, with the power of producing on us certain impressions. You and I know our friends as such aggregates, and nothing more.

And what do we mean by discarnate personalities? In most minds, the first answer will probably bear a pretty close resemblance to Fra Angelico's angels, and very nice angels they are! But to some of the more prosy minds that have thought on the subject in the light of the best and fullest information, or misinformation, probably the answer will be more like this: A personality, incarnate or postcarnate, in the last analysis, is a manifestation of the Cosmic Soul. From that the raw material is supplied with the star dust, and later, through our senses, from the earliest reactions of our protozoic ancestors, up to our dreams; and the material is worked up into each personality through reactions with the environment. Thus it becomes an aggregate of capacities to impress another personality with certain sensations, ideas, emotions. As already said, the incarnate personality impresses us thru certain vibrations. But after that portion of the vibrations constituting "the body" disappears, there still abides somewhere the capacity of impressing us, at least in the dream life. Perhaps it abides only in the memory of survivors, and gets into our dreams telepathically, though that is losing probability every day; and, with our anthropomorphic habits, we want to know "where" this capacity to impress us abides. The thinkers generally say: In the Cosmic reservoir, which I would rather express as the psychic ocean, boundless, fathomless, throbbing eternally. It seems to be made up of the original mind-potential plus all thoughts and feelings that have ever been. And into this ocean seem to be constantly passing those currents that we know as individualities, that can each influence, and even intermingle with, other individualities, here as well as there: for here really is there. While each does this, it still retains its own individuality. This is, of course, a vague string of guesses venturing outward from the borderland of our knowledge. It may be a little clearer, the more we bear in mind that the apparent influencings and interminglings seem to be telepathic.

Now apparently among the accomplishments of a personality, does not _necessarily_ inhere that of depressing a scale x pounds: for when that capacity is entirely absent, from the apparent personalities who visit us in the dream state, they can impress us in every other way, even to all the reciprocities of sex. But for some reasons not yet understood, with ordinary dreamers these impressions are not as congruous, persistent, recurrent, or regulable in the dream life as in the waking life. But with Mrs. Piper, Hodgson after his death, and especially G.P. and others, were about as persistent and consistent associates as anybody living, barring the fact that they could not show themselves over an hour or two at a time, which was the limit of the medium's psychokinetic power, on which their manifestations depended. But that these personalities are not in time to be evolved so that they will be more permanent and consistent with dreamers generally, would be a contradiction to at least some of the implications of evolution.

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Accepting provisionally the identity of a postcarnate life with the life indicated in dreams, are there any further indications of its nature? There are some, which may lend some slight confirmation to the theory of identity.

It seems to show itself not only in the visions of the sensitives, but in the dream life of all of us. If Mrs. Piper's dream state (I name her only as a type) is really one of communication with souls who have passed into a new life, dream states generally may not extravagantly be supposed to be foretastes of that life. And so far as concerns their desirability, why should they not be? Our ordinary dreams are, like the dreams of the sensitives, superior to time, space, matter and force--to all the trammels of our waking environment and powers. In dreams we experience unlimited histories, and pass over unlimited spaces, in an instant; see, hear, feel, touch, taste, smell, enjoy unlimited things; walk, swim, fly, change things, with unlimited ease; do things with unlimited power; make what we will--music, poetry, objects of art, situations, dramas, with unlimited faculty, and enjoy unlimited society. Unless we have eaten too much, or otherwise got ourselves out of order in the waking life, in the dream life we seldom if ever know what it is to be too late for anything, or too far from anything; we freely fall from chimneys or precipices, and I suppose it will soon be aeroplanes, with no worse consequences than comfortably waking up into the everyday world; we sometimes solve the problems which baffle us here; we see more beautiful things than we see here; and, far above all, we resume the ties that are broken here.

The indications seem to be that if we ever get the hang of that life, we can have pretty much what we like, and eliminate what we don't like--continue what we enjoy, and stop what we suffer--find no bars to congeniality, or compulsion to boredom. To good dreamers it is unnecessary to offer proof of any of these assertions, and to prove them to others is impossible.

The dream life contains so much more beauty, so much fuller emotion, and such wider reaches than the waking life, that one is tempted to regard it as the real life, to which the waking life is somehow a necessary preliminary. So orthodox believers regard the life after death as the real life: yet most of their hopes regarding that life--even the strongest hope of rejoining lost loved ones--are realized here during the brief throbs of the dream life.

There seems to be no happiness from association in our ordinary life which is not obtainable, by some people at least, from association in the dream life. And as this appears to exist between incarnate A and postcarnate B, there is at least a suggestion that it may exist between postcarnate A and postcarnate B, and to a degree vastly more clear and abiding than during the present discrepancy between the incarnate and postcarnate conditions? This of course assumes, that B's appearance in A's dream life, just as he appeared on earth (though, as I know to be the case, sometimes wiser, healthier, jollier, and more lovable generally), is something more than a mild attack of dyspepsia on the part of A.

Dreams do not seem to abound in work, and are often said not to abound in morality, but I know that they sometimes do--in morality higher than any attainable in our waking life. Certainly the scant vague indications from the dream suggestions of a future life do not necessarily preclude abundant work and morality, any more than work and sundry self-denials are precluded on a holiday because one does not happen to perform them. Moreover, the hoped-for future conditions may not contain the necessities for either labor or self-restraint that present conditions do: they may not be the same dangers there as here in the _dolce far niente_, or in Platonic friendships.

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Men are not consistent in their attitude regarding dreams. They admit the dream state to be ideal--constantly use such expressions as "A dream of loveliness," "Happier than I could even dream," "Surpasses my fondest dreams," and yet on the other hand they call its experience "but the baseless vision of a dream." What do they mean by "baseless"? Certainly it is not lack of vividness or emotional intensity. It is probably the lack of duration in the happy experiences, and of the possibility of remembering them, and, still more, of enjoying similar ones at will. Yet the sensitives do both in recurrent instalments of the dream life, and like the rest of us, through the intervening waking periods, after the first hour or so, generally know nothing of the dreams. It is not vividness of the dream life itself that is lacking, but vividness in our memories of it. James defines our waking personality as the stream of consciousness: the dream life gives no such stream. To-night does not continue last night as to-day continues yesterday. The dream life is not like a stream, but more like a series, though hardly integral enough to be a series, of disconnected pools, many of them perhaps more enchanting than any parts of the waking stream, but not, like that stream, an organic whole with motion toward definite results, and power to attain them. But suppose the dream life continues after the body's death, and under direction toward definite ends, at least so far as the waking life is, and still free from the trammels of the waking life--suppose us to have at least as much power to secure its joys and avoid its terrors as we have regarding those of the waking life; and with all the old intimacies which it spasmodically restores, restored permanently, and with the discipline of separation to make them nearer perfect. What more can we manage to want?

The suggestion has come to more than one student, that when we enter into life--as spermatozoa, or star dust if you please--we enter into the eternal life, but that the physical conditions essential to our development into appreciating it, are a sort of veil between it and our consciousness. In our waking life we know it only through the veil; but when in sleep or trance, the material environment is removed from consciousness, the veil becomes that much thinner, and we get better glimpses of the transcendent reality.

Does it not seem then as if, in dreams, we enter upon our closer relation with the hyper-phenomenal mind? All sorts of things seem to be in it, from the veriest trifles and absurdities up to the highest things our minds can receive, and presumably an infinity of things higher still. They appear to flow into us in all sorts of ways, presumably depending upon the condition of the nerve apparatus through which they flow. If that is out of gear from any disorder or injury, what it receives is not only trifling, but often grotesque and painful; while if it is in good estate, it often receives things far surpassing in beauty and wisdom those of our waking phenomenal world.

Apparently every dreamer is a medium for this flow, but dreamers vary immensely in their capacity to receive it--from Hodge, who dreams only when he has eaten too much, or Professor Gradgrind who never dreams at all, up to Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Piper.

As oft remarked, dreams generally are nonsense, but some dreams, or parts of some dreams, are perhaps the most significant things we know. Each vision, waking or sleeping, must have a cause, and as an expression of that cause, must be veridical. On the one hand, the cause of a trivial dream is generally too trivial to be ascertained: it may be too much lobster, or impaired circulation or respiration; while on the other hand (and here the paradox seems to be explained), the cause of an important dream must, _ex vi termini_, be some important event. But important events are rare, and therefore significant dreams are rare; while trivial events are frequent, and therefore trivial dreams are frequent.

The important and rare event _may_ be such a conjunction of circumstances and temperaments as makes it possible for a postcarnate intelligence, assuming the existence of such, to communicate with an incarnate one. That such apparent communications are rare tends to indicate their genuineness.

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Now to develop a little farther the time-honored hypothesis of a cosmic soul as explaining dreams, and supported by them.

Admit, provisionally at least, that the medium is merely an extraordinary dreamer. Does a man do his own dreaming, or is it done for him? Does a man do his own digesting, circulating, assimilating, or is it done for him? If he does not do these things himself, who does? About the physical functions through the sympathetic nerve, we answer unhesitatingly: the cosmic force. How, then, about the psychic functions? Are they done by the cosmic psyche?

Like respiration, they are partly under our control, but that does not affect the problem. Who runs them when we do not run them, even when we try to stop them that we may get to sleep? Even when, after they have yielded to our entreaties to stop, and we are asleep, they begin going again--without our will. The only probability I can make out is that our thinking is run by a power not ourselves, as much as our other partly involuntary functions.

To hold that a man does his own dreaming--that it is done by a secondary layer of his own consciousness--is to hold that we are made up of layers of consciousness, of which the poorest layer is that of what we call our waking life, and the better layers are at our service only in our dreams--that when a man is asleep or mad he can solve problems, compose music, create pictures, to which, when awake and in his sober senses, and in a condition to profit by his work, and give profit from it, he is inadequate.

Nay more, the theory claims that a man's working consciousness--his self--the only self known to him or the world, will hold and shape his life by a set of convictions which, in sleep, he will _himself_ prove wrong, and thereby revolutionize his philosophy and his entire life. Wouldn't it be more reasonable to attribute all such results--the solutions of the problems, the music, the pictures, the corrections of the errors--to a power outside himself?

I cannot believe that there's anything in my individual consciousness which my experience or that of my ancestors has not placed there--in raw material at least; or that in working up that raw material _I_ can exert any genius in my sometimes chaotic dreams that I cannot exert in my systematized waking hours. All the people I meet and talk with in my dreams _may_ have been met and talked with by me or my forebears, though I don't believe it; but the works of art I see have not been known to me or my ancestors or any other mortal; nor have I any sign of the genius to combine whatever elements of them I may have seen, into any such designs. And when in dreams _other_ persons tell me things contrary to my firmest convictions, in which things I later discover germs of most important workable truth, the persons who tell me that, and who are different from me as far as fairly decent persons can differ from each other, are certainly not, as the good Du Prel would have us believe, myself. All these things are not figments of _my_ mind--if they are figments of a mind, it's a mind bigger than mine. The biggest claim I can make, or assent to anybody else making, is that my mind is telepathically receptive of the product of that greater mind.

Here are some farther evidences of the greater mind, given by Lombroso (_After Death, What?_, 320 f.):

It is well known that in his dreams Goethe solved many weighty scientific problems and put into words many most beautiful verses. So also La Fontaine (_The Fable of Pleasures_) and Coleridge and Voltaire. Bernard Palissy had in a dream the inspiration for one of his most beautiful ceramic pieces....

Holde composed while in a dream _La Phantasie_, which reflects in its harmony its origin; and Nodier created _Lydia_, and at the same time a whole theory on the future of dreaming. Condillac in dream finished a lecture interrupted the evening before. Kruger, Corda, and Maignan solved in dreams mathematical problems and theorems. Robert Louis Stevenson, in his _Chapters on Dreams_, confesses that portions of his most original novels were composed in the dreaming state. Tartini had while dreaming one of his most portentous musical inspirations. He saw a spectral form approaching him. It is Beelzebub in person. He holds a magic violin in his hands, and the sonata begins. It is a divine adagio, melancholy-sweet, a lament, a dizzy succession of rapid and intense notes. Tartini rouses himself, leaps out of bed, seizes his violin, and reproduces all that he had heard played in his sleep. He names it the _Sonata del Diavolo_,...

Giovanni Dupré got in a dream the conception of his very beautiful _Pietà_. One sultry summer day Dupré was lying on a divan thinking hard on what kind of pose he should choose for the Christ. He fell asleep, and in dream he saw the entire group at last complete, with Christ in the very pose he had been aspiring to conceive, but which his mind had not succeeded in completely realizing.

It is a quite frequent experience that a person perplexed by a problem at night finds it solved on waking in the morning. Efforts to remember, which are unsuccessful before going to sleep, on waking are often found accomplished.

A dream is a work of genius, and in many respects, perhaps most, especially in vividness of imagination, the best example we have. It is the most spontaneous, constructed with the least effort from fewest materials, the least restrained, and often immeasurably surpassing all works of waking genius in the same department. A genius gets a trifling hint, and being inspired by the gods (anthropomorphic for: flowed in upon by the cosmic soul?) builds out of the hint a poem or a drama or a symphony. You and I build dreams surpassing the poem or the drama or the symphony, but our friends Dryasdust and Myopia inquire into our experiences, and sometimes find a little hint on which a dream was built, and then all dreams are demonstrated things unworthy of serious consideration. Is it not a more rational view that the fact that the soul can in the dream state elaborate so much from so little, indicates it to be then already in a life which has no limits?

Havelock Ellis, in his _World of Dreams_, says (p. 229):

Our eyes close, our muscles grow slack, the reins fall from our hands. But it sometimes happens that the horse knows the road home even better than we know it ourselves.

He puts "the horse" outside of the dreamer plainly enough here. He further says (p. 280).

If we take into account the complete psychic life of dreaming, subconscious as well as conscious, it is waking, not sleeping, life which may be said to be limited.... Sleep, Vaschide has said, is not, as Homer thought, the brother of Death, but of Life, and, it may be added, the elder brother....

He quotes from Bergson (_Revue Philosophique_, December, 1908, p. 574):

This dream state is the substratum of our normal state. Nothing is added in waking life; on the contrary, waking life is obtained by the limitation, concentration, and tension of that diffuse psychological life which is the life of dreaming.... To be awake is to will; cease to will, detach yourself from life, become disinterested: in so doing you pass from the waking ego to the dreaming ego, which is less _tense_, but more _extended_ than the other.

Ellis continues (p. 281):

I have cultivated, so far as I care to, my garden of dreams, and it scarcely seems to me that it is a large garden. Yet every path of it, I sometimes think, might lead at last to the heart of the universe.

But with the exception of a few spasmodic inspirations, the records of dreams, ordinary or from the sensitives, contain nothing new--nothing to relieve man from the blessed necessity of eating his bread, intellectual as well as material, in the sweat of his brow; and, perhaps more important still, little to make the interests or responsibilities of this life weaker because of any realized inferiority to those of a possible later life.

It would apparently be inconsistent in Nature, or God, if you prefer, to start our evolution under earthly conditions, educating us in knowledge and character through labor and suffering, but at the same time throwing open to our perceptions, from another life, a wider range of knowledge and character attainable without labor or suffering.

I have no time or space or inclination to argue with those who deny a plan in Nature. He who does, probably lives away from Nature. It appears to have been a part of that plan that for a long time past most of us should "believe in" immortality, and that, at least until very lately, none of us should know anything about it. Confidence in immortality has been a dangerous thing. So far we haven't all made a very good use of it. Many of the people who have had most of it and busied themselves most with it, so to speak, have largely transferred their interests to the other life, and neglected and abused this one. "Other-worldliness" is a well-named vice, and positive evidence of immortality might be more dangerous than mere confidence in it.

All this, I think, supports the notion that whatever, if anything, is in store for us beyond this life, it would be a self-destructive scheme of things (or Scheme of Things, if you prefer) that would throw the future life into farther competition with our interests here, at least before we are farther evolved here. Looking at history by and large, we children have not generally been trusted with edge tools until we had grown to some sort of capacity to handle them. If the Mesopotamians or Egyptians or Greeks or Romans had had gunpowder, it looks as if they would have blown most of themselves and each other out of existence, and the rest back into primitive savagery, and stayed there until the use of gunpowder became one of the lost arts. But the new knowledge of evolution has given the modern world a new intellectual interest; and the new altruism, a new moral one. The reasons for doing one's best in this life, and doing it actively, are so much stronger and clearer than they were when so many good people could fall into asceticism and other-worldliness, that perhaps we are now fit to be trusted with proofs of an after life. It is very suggestive that these apparent proofs came contemporaneously with the new knowledge tending to make them safe; and equally suggestive that it is when we have begun to suffer from certain breakdowns in religion, that we have been provided with new material for bracing it up.

At the opposite extreme, it also is suggestive that these new indications that our present life is a petty thing beside a future one, have come just when modern science has so increased our control over material nature that we are in peculiar danger of having our interest in higher things buried beneath material interests, and enervated by over-indulgence in material delights.

If it be true that, roughly speaking, we are not entrusted with dangerous things before we are evolved to the point where we can keep their danger within bounds, the fact that we have not until very lately, if yet, been entrusted with any verification of the dream of the survival of bodily death, would seem to confer upon the spiritistic interpretation of the recent apparent verifications, a pragmatic sanction--an accidental embryo pun over which the historic student is welcome to a smile, and which, since the preceding clause was written, I have seen used in all seriousness by Professor Giddings. Conclusive or not, that "sanction" is certainly an addition to the arguments that existed before, including the general argument from evolution. And, so far as the phenomena go to establish the spiritistic hypothesis, surely they are not to be lightly regarded because as yet they do not establish it more conclusively.

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