THE DIMENSIONS OF DREAMS.
NOT long ago a book appeared in which the interest centred in a Fifth Dimension. Its presence was realised uncomfortably by the hero at intervals during the story, and it began with a loss of perspective and an opening of im- measurable distance at a place in the Home Counties. The scene was laid chiefly in modern London, and the interest of the book, which was supposed to gather round this new, mysterious condition, lay much more in the portraits of well- known people introduced by the ingenious authors than in the Fifth Dimension, which, to tell the truth, only produced the effect of a nightmare in perspective and was less convincing than an earthquake.
It needs a subtler medium than the novelist's to convince as of a margin unknown iii our so carefully tabulated unive4e. It is only in dreams that we can touch a plane where experience
Is 'altivared and reason left stranded. A Political satire on modern life cannot, afford to , be hadependent of , probability.: but dreams have a peculiar quality which blots out all sense of the incongruous, so that things ridiculous or vain to waking reason then become convincing through some amazing coherence of impossibilities. • -
The best dreams are those we dream awake ; but they are rare. Dreams in sleep also bring us to the threshold of that door opening on a land that lies beyond the bounds of waking reason. A dream, while you are dreaming, is never ridiculous; in fact, dreams are often beset by a vague consciousness of tragedy, perhaps because, as we are told, dreams come in the instant before waking; when the bodily force is at its lowest ebb, and the stillness of sleep brings us into the antechamber of some wonderful strange state, cousin to sleep and its visions. People who dream rational or beautiful dreams are unusual; but all proper dreams, piecemeal or coherent, have this ,quality of opening another dimension inside our Minds. It must be because of this new spaciousness, that is wide like the range of prophecy, that certain people have sought, and will always seek, for vision aud oracle out of the material of dreams:— " I dreamed a dreiry dream yestieen,
God keep us a' frae sorrow.
I dreamed I pu'ed the hick sae green, we my true love on Yarrow."
The new dimension of infinite space that dreams give is a thing wide beyond any sane conception of our waking minds. Yet it is bound to the waking state by an elastic thread, slender and invisible, of which we are conscious for a flash in the instant of waking. It seems to be in the perception of some infinite Margin to life that this Fifth Dimension lies, a sudden intuition of unlimited existence pinned down to a narrow circle. It Underlies all poetry, probably all art; but it is seldom obvious, and the communication of this sense is the most evasive thing in the world, and comes when you least expect it, taking you off into the dream dimension like a spring from a diving-board. There are two lines of Milton that sweep you into the infinite borderland that lies all about the world of sense :— • "As when a Gryphon thro' the wildernras, With winged course, o'er hill or moory dale, Pursues the Arimaspiau."
No crash of armed archangels or tuning of heavenly choirs surprises you with such a vague, tremulous wonder of awe as the vision of the scaly monster's huge threatening folds wallowing in the track of the fleeing savage whO struggles heavily through blind leagues of desert with the winged terror at his back. The weight of the great words (especially if the Gryphon gets his full complement of terror in a long "y ") helps the dream sense, but it does not explain the magic. Who the Arimaspian was, and what became of him, are questions to beguile our waking sense ; but the roll of the lines upsets a meddling intelligence, and sweeps you breathless ' within the dominating illusion of dreams.
Intelligence is not required in dreams. They have no logical sequence; the action advances with a leaping.pole, annihilating time and leaving reason gasping. A real dream has no conscious beginning, and very seldom a definite end. The essence of a dream is that it is always on the way to somewhere, and something is always just going to happen. Dreams are usually solemn affairs, however absurd they appear waking. It is not possible to indulge so slight a thing as a sense of humour in face of that immense vagueness of infinite space that descends upon you. We call it illusion ; but after all, the dream dimension may be the proper inheritance of a thing enclosed and half-conscious within us, and so in dreams we gasp after this new, astonishing dimension because the "angelic butterfly" within the worm is giving a premature wriggle towards its final apotheosis in free air and light and the world above ground.
Among the things that experience teaches us, one of the most useful is acquired during the first seven years of our lives. A great part of these years is taken up in learning, unconsciously, how not to fall out of bed. Every night for seven years or BO the rollings of excursive childhood are stopped by the sides of our cribs, until at last eiperience, though unreasoned, teaches us to stay in the middle, and we fall out no more 'for the rest of our lives. So the excursive soul learns, for comfort's sake, to stop within the bounds of
a very narrowly bounded world, and. unconsciously we limit our excursions within the limits of what experience proves safe and fit. The mere fact of physical health prevents most of us from going about the world in a state of perpetual amazement that would ill befit sane people. Dreams have no proper part in sensible, active bodily life, and of this we are warned in the awful sense of helplessness that comes some- times in a dream. But dreams come, and throughout the world's history somebody is always dogmatising about them. And whether interpreters new and old prove fallible, or enter- taining, or inspiring, it is always necessary to have "some glimpse of incomprehensibles, and thoughts of things that thoughts but tenderly touch," because, after all, five senses and four dimensions are but a narrow cage to confine "this manifold creature man." This world of ours, so circumscribed by the laws of use and wont, is still beset on all sides by the unseen. There are people who can slide out of the bonds of time and space into the mysterious region where there is no before and after,—prophets and telepathists and hill- dwelling people who have the gift of second-sight. Such people have the key of that dream dimension which we in dreams "but tenderly touch." But since it is a thing natural to them, they do not clamour about it, just as people in good health are unconscious of their bodily organs, and sane people are not conscious—at least not painfully so—of the prison-walls standing fast about them. The old idea of a flat world had an immense advantage over the proper planetary system in giving room for a Bane imagina- tion to touch on this sense of space. Our ideas of the universe nowadays are too circumscribed, since in the event of a fall from the earth, if by ill-luck you should miss all the planets, you must eventually strike a fixed star. But when the world was set all about by chaos, and coming inadvertently to the edge you should fall over into the timeless beginnings of things, then waking life lay nearer the dimensions of a dream. But for all that, it is in no geographical system that the Fifth Distension is to he found, because, like the Kingdom of Heaven, it is within us," within a valley of this restless mind," where we can reach it when we choose :— " At my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near,
And yonder all about us lie Deserts of vast eternity."
You can slide into those deserts between the hearthrug and the tea-tray while the Gryphon pursues the Asimaspian over his labouring waste of sand. A trifle can bring the dimension upon you. You can reach it during influenza by trying to count the muds of a corkscrew ;' it comes, as it goes, at a breath, and the waking sense can never long contain it. But it underlies life, like stirrings of ancestral wisdom dim within experienced reason, or like the great awful bones of primeval monsters hidden in Mendip caves. It is not meant for sun- shine and the green earth ; it belongs to darkness and the far-off beginnings of things, a region vague and vast beyond living comprehension, where the soul, become half a stranger to herself, gropes at incomprehensibles in the awful freedom of illimitable space that comes upon us in the dimension of dreams :—
"Letting us pent-up creatures through • Into eternity, our due."
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