Maybe twice a year for most of his adult life, Samuel Clemens met a mysterious but familiar girlfriend in his dreams, according to some notes of his published in Harper's. Of the first time he lost her in a dream, he wrote, "I turned around, and the log house was gone. I ran here and there and yonder down the lanes between the rows of tombs, calling Alice; and presently the night closed down, and I could not find my way. Then I woke, in deep distress over my loss, and was in my bed in Philadelphia". The published notes close with a final comment on her death in a later dream:That was a terrible thing to me at the time. It was preternaturally vivid; and the pain and the grief and the misery of it to me transcended many sufferings that I have known in waking life. For everything in a dream is more deep and strong and sharp and real than is ever its pale imitation in the unreal life which is ours when we go about awake and clothed with our artificial selves in this vague and dull-tinted artificial world. When we die we shall slough off this cheap intellect, perhaps, and go abroad into Dreamland clothed in our real selves, and aggrandized and enriched by the command over the mysterious mental magician who is here not our slave, but only our guest.I like this. The dream life is real because the sense of loss and misery felt there, and felt upon waking, is complete; none of our expressions, including feelings and imagination, are compromised by reason and its accounting for competing obligations and practical concerns; such so-called harsh realities make life "unreal" because they make us "artificial"; and they make us artificial because they make us check our impulses, make us plan and act in strategic interests that are foreign to our nature, so to speak, and that feed into life's complex network of power relationships, the ultimate game of pretend. In dreams, imagination and feeling reign, and they are felt and exercised honestly and fully. The very vividness of their creation is the character of the real.
Notes:
- How amazing to me that he felt such a sense of loss over a dreamed of girl. Grief dreams about real persons, understandable.
- People wake and interpret dreams, introducing the artificial into the real, dressing themselves in reason.
