H G Wells Omnibus, page 156
II
SUPPRESSIONS AND SYMBOLISM IN DREAMLAND
BUT THE FANTASIES of dreamland go an immeasurable way beyond what is now conceivable and practical.
The subliminal self is never straightforward. It awakens us, for example, to sex and the social reactions of adolescence in the queerest, most roundabout way. There are sound biological explanations why our minds should work in this fashion, but I cannot go into them now. The submerged intervener is cryptic and oracular; it hints and perplexes. Symbols become persons and persons symbols; individuals, animals, institutions, amalgamate and divide and change into one another.
Religions are such stuff as dreams are made of. The Athanasian Creed is severely logical in dreamland, Isis is transfigured into Hathor, a cow, Quannon, the crescent moon and Murillo’s Queen of Heaven, and still the dream flows on. Osiris becomes his own son Horus, who becomes again Osiris and the Virgin Mother, in incessant rotation. This is the atmosphere of this uncontrollable Wonderland beyond the Turn, in which my accumulated loves and suppressions, disappointments and stresses, find release. But very plainly it is my personal needs that provide the substance of the stories with which my dreaming self now consoles and regales me.
In the past I do not recall dreams as a frequent factor in my existence, though some affected me very importantly. As a child I used to have a sort of geometrical nightmare as if a mad kaleidoscope charged down upon me, and this was accompanied by intense distress. I may have been very young then, because I cannot remember how I awakened or whether I conveyed my distress to anyone. Nor have I ever come upon a description of that dream as happening to any other child.
But I remember a considerable number of quite frightful dreams that came before my teens. I read precociously, and I was pursued implacably, to a screaming and weeping awakening, by the more alarming animals I read about. An uncle from the West Indies described some frightful spiders that scratched and crawled. I was then put to bed alone in the dark in the upstairs bedroom of a strange house, and I disgraced myself by screaming the house down.
I had horror dreams of torture and cruelty. One made me an atheist. My mother was a deeply religious woman, but she did her best to conceal the Devil from me; there were pictures in an old prayer-book showing hell well alight, but she obliterated these with stamp paper which I was only partially successful in removing, so that until I held the page up to the light, hell was a mere suspicion. And one day I read a description in an old number of CHAMBER’S JOURNAL of a man being broken on the wheel over a slow fire, and in my sleep it flared up into immeasurable disgust. By a mental leap which cut out all intermediaries, the dream artist made it clear that if indeed there was an all powerful God, then it was he and he alone who stood there conducting this torture. I woke and stared at the empty darkness. There was no alternative but madness, and sanity prevailed. God had gone out of my life. He was impossible.
From that time on, I began to invent and talk blasphemy. I do not like filth. Merely dirty stories disgust me, and when sexual jokes have an element of laughter in them almost always it is dishonouring and cruel laughter. But theology has always seemed to me an area for clean fun that should do no harm to any properly constituted person. Blasphemy may frighten unemancipated minds, but it is unbecoming that human beings should be governed by fear. From first to last I have invented a considerable amount of excellent blasphemy. ALL ABOARD FOR ARARAT is the last of a long series of drawings and writings, many of which have never seen and probably never will see the light of print. There must be lingering bits of belief in order to produce the relief of laughter, and such jests may fade out very rapidly at no very distant date.
Only a few other dreams stuck in my memory before I discovered the Happy Turning, and mostly they were absurd and misleading freaks of fantasy. I dreamt my mother was ill and in great distress and wrote off post haste to her. There was nothing at all the matter with her.
I must have had anxiety dreams when I was over-working, in which everything was at sixes and sevens, I must have had them because I devised a technique for dealing with them. Directly I woke up, I got up and dismissed them. I trained myself to make tea and set to work soberly in a dressing-gown, and soon everything fell back into its place and the disturbance succumbed to fatigue and natural sleepiness. My friend J. W. Dunne, who wrote AN EXPERIMENT WITH TIME, lost himself for a time in a Serial Universe and has come back a most delightful writer of fantastic tales, induced me to keep a notebook at my bed-head and jot down my dreams fresh and hot. I do not remember making a note. I just woke up, and whatever dreams may have been hanging about vanished unimportantly forthwith.
So my present resort to dreamland is a new experience. I am a happy explorer telling of a delightful world he has come upon, beyond expectation.
III
COMPENSATION BEYOND THE HAPPY TURNING
THE SCENERY OF my dreamland is always magnificent or exquisite or otherwise delightful. I should not note it if it were not, and I find dear and delightful people I had never hoped to see again, happy and welcoming. Sometimes they are just themselves for a time, sometimes they are agreeably blended with other people, and at any moment they may see fit to impersonate someone else and cease to be whatever they began by being.
Nobody is dead in this world of release, and I hate nobody. I think that this absence of hate may be very recent. It may be due to my subconscious revolt against the unavoidable hates, disputes, suspicions and conflicts of our daily life in this war. Or it may be that with advancing years a mellowing comes to the mind with the attenuation of ambitions and rivalries. They matter so little at seventy-seven. Both factors, the normal one and this abnormal one of war conditions, may be contributing to my escape.
My waking life is now one of very fierce and definite antagonisms. I feel that the generations ahead may be cheated of much or all of the huge emancipations that could and should follow upon this world storm of fighting; and that ancient and evil organizations and traditions and the necessity common minds are under to believe they have natural inferiors, of whom they are entitled to take advantage, may frustrate all our hopes. I am compelled to spend my utmost energy in warfare against these things.
Dreamland is in flat contradiction to all this distressful strain. Nothing of these conflicts pursues me beyond the Happy Turning. At the Happy Turning is a recognizable Holy Water Stoup which has somehow identified itself with Truth, and in my Dreamland there is not the slightest difficulty about dipping a finger and sprinkling the Holy Catholic Church, or whatever ugly menace to mankind happens to be upon my heels, with it. Whereupon the evil I fear and fight here with all my strength, explodes with a slightly unpleasant odour, and vanishes. Why did I let my heart be troubled? Why was I afraid?
IV
THE HOLY CARNIVAL
NOTHING DISTRESSFUL TO me can clamber over that Threshold now. But anything and everything that shows me deference may play its part in my relaxation. I have had some very entertaining divine conferences. The gods men worship are difficult to assemble and impossible to count, because of their incorrigible habit of dissolving spasmodically into one another. I have remarked already upon the permutations and combinations, if those words are permissible, of Isis, the original Virgin Mary. Cleopatra’s infinite variety was nothing to it. The tangle of the Trinities is even more fantastically versatile. There is the Athanasian Trinity and the Arian Trinity, the Catholic and the Orthodox, the Logos and that ever ambiguous Virgin. There is the Gnostic Godhead, which makes Jehovah out to be the very Devil, and Pope’s consolidated Deity:
“Father of all, in every age
in every clime adored,
By Saint, by Savage and by Sage,
Jehovah, Jove or Lord.”
The vast theogony galumphs about in an endless confusion of identities with a stern transcendent solemnity that never deserts it. “Which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.”
A few such cries are uttered with an air of profound significance; a considerable amount of thunder goes on, a crackle of miracles, but never a laugh. To laugh is to awaken.
And in and out and round about this preposterous dance of the divinities, circulates an innumerable swarm of priests and prophets and teachers, wearing the oddest of robes and garments, mitres, triple crowns, scarlet hats, coquettish hoods. No Carnival gone mad can compare with this insane leaping and tumbling procession. They pour endlessly through the streets of my dreamland; striking strange symbolic attitudes, some with virgin beards, some grotesquely shaven and shorn, hunchbacked with copes, bellowing strange chants, uttering dark sayings—but always incredibly solemn. They tuck up their petticoats, these grave elderly gentlemen, and one, two, three, leap gulfs of logic.
I noted the present Primate, chief now of the English order of primates, his lawn sleeves like the plump wings of a theological Strassburg goose, as, bathed in the natural exudations of a strenuous faith, he pranced by me, with the Vatican a-kicking up ahind and afore, and a yellow Jap a-kicking up ahind old Pope. I had a momentary glimpse of the gloomy Dean, in ecstatic union with the Deity, yet contraceptive as ever, and then, before I could satisfy a natural curiosity, a tapping delirium of shrilling cymbals swept him away, “Glory!…Glory!… ALLELUIA!…”
As, on the verge of awakening, I watch this teeming disorder of the human brain, which is always the same and increasingly various, I listen for one simple laugh, I look for one single derisive smile. Always I encounter faces of stupid earnestness. They are positively not putting it on, unless earnest self-deception had become second nature. They are not pretending to be such fools. They are such fools…
There is this phase between dreaming and awakening, there is a sense of rapidly intensifying conflict and strain before the straining catgut snaps—exactly as it snaps when we come out of anaesthesia. The Brocken Witches’ Sabbath begins dispersing and dissolving, becomes a wildly spinning whirl. Will there be enough broomsticks for everybody? Hi broomstick! Are you engaged, broomstick? That’s my broomstick. They all leap for the nearest one. They rush to and fro about me and through me, terrified at the Berlioz clangor that heralds the night of the Gods. The Archbishop, Inge, His Holiness, Rabbis, thrust about me. They spin up towards the zenith colliding and fighting among themselves—serious to the end.
Cosmo Gordon Lang, I remark, gets into theological difficulties with his steed, which rears and throws him. There is a wild struggle in which his broomstick vanishes. Down he goes, legs and arms and robes, cartwheeling faster and faster. The dream becomes a religious hailstorm. Whiz, whiz, they come pelting.
I have a vague idea I ought to put up an umbrella. Umbrella?
I laugh and am awake.
V
JESUS OF NAZARETH DISCUSSES HIS FAILURE
1.
THE COMPANION I find most congenial in the Beyond is Jesus of Nazareth. Like everything in Dreamland he fluctuates, but beyond the Happy Turning his personality is at least as distinct as my own. His scorn and contempt for Christianity go beyond my extremest vocabulary. He was, I believe, the putative son of a certain carpenter, Joseph, but Josephus says his actual father was a Roman soldier named Pantherus. If so, Jesus did not know it.
He began his career as a good illiterate patriotic Jew in indignant revolt against the Roman rule and the Quisling priests who cringed to it. He took up his self-appointed mission under the influence of John the Baptist, who was making trouble for both the Tetrarch in Galilee and the Roman Procurator in Jerusalem. John was an uncompromising Puritan, and the first thing his disciples had to do, was to get soundly baptized in Jordan. Then he seemed to run out of ideas. After their first encounter John and Jesus went their different ways. There was little discipleship in Jesus.
He played an inconspicuous role in the Salome affair, and he assures me he never baptized anybody. But he was brooding on the Jewish situation, which he felt needed more than moral denunciation and water. He decided to get together a band of followers and march on Jerusalem. Where, as the Gospel witnesses tell very convincingly, with such contradictions as are natural to men writing about it all many years later, the sacred Jewish priests did their best to obliterate him. He learnt much as he went on. He seems to have said some good things and had others imputed to him. He became a sort of Essene Joe Miller. He learnt and changed as he went on.
Gods! how he hated priests, and how he hates them now! And Paul! “Fathering all this nonsense about being ‘The Christ’ on me of all people! Christian! He started that at Antioch. I never had the chance of a straight talk to him. I wish I could come upon him some time. But he never seems to be here… There are a few things I could say to him,” said Jesus reflectively, and added, “Plain things…”
I regretted Paul’s absence.
“One must draw the line somewhere,” I said. In this happy place, Paul’s in the discard.”
“Yes,” reflected Jesus, dismissing Paul; “there were such a lot of things I didn’t know, and such a lot of snares for the feet of a man who feels more strongly than he understands. I see so plainly now how incompetently I set about it.”
He surveyed his shapely feet cooling in the refreshing greensward of Happyland. The stigmata were in evidence, but not obtrusively so. They were not eyesores. They have since been disgustingly irritated and made much of by the sedulous uncleanness of the saints.
“Never have disciples,” said Jesus of Nazareth. “it was my greatest mistake. I imitated the tradition of having such divisional commanders to marshal the rabble I led to Jerusalem. It has been the common mistake of all world-menders, and I fell into it in my turn as a matter of course. I had no idea what a real revolution had to be; how it had to go on from and to and fro between man and man, each one making his contribution. I was just another young man in a hurry. I thought I could carry the whole load, and I picked my dozen almost haphazard.
“What a crew they were! I am told that even these Gospels you talk about, are unflattering in their account of them.
“There is nothing flattering to be told about them. What a crew to start upon saving the world! From the first they began badgering me about their relative importance…
“And their stupidity! They would misunderstand the simplest metaphors. I would say, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is like so-and-so and so-and so’…In the simplest terms…
“They always got it wrong.
“After a time I realized I could never open my mouth and think aloud without being misunderstood. I remember trying to make our breach with all orthodox and ceremonial limitations clear beyond any chance of relapse. I made up a parable about a Good Samaritan. Not half a bad story.”
“We have the story,” I said.
“I was sloughing off my patriotism at a great rate. I was realizing the Kingdom of Heaven had to be a universal thing. Or nothing. Does your version go like that?”
“It goes like that.”
“But it never altered their belief that they had come into the business on the ground floor.”
“You told another good story about some Labourers in the Vineyard.”
“From the same point of view?”
“From the same point of view.”
“Did it alter their ideas in the least?”
“Nothing seemed to alter their ideas in the least.”
“It was a dismal time when our great March on Jerusalem petered out. You know when they got us in the Garden of Gethsemane I went to pieces completely… The disciples, when they realized public opinion was against them, just dropped their weapons and dispersed. No guts in them. Simon Peter slashed off a man’s ear and then threw away his sword and pretended not to know me…
“I wanted to kick myself. I derided myself. I saw all the mistakes I had made in my haste. I spoke in the bitterest irony. Nothing for it now but to know one had had good intentions. ‘My peace,’ I said, ‘I give unto you.’
“The actual crucifixion was a small matter in comparison. I was worn out and glad to be dying, so far as that went, long before those two other fellows—I forget who they were. One was drunk and abusive. But being crucified upon the irreparable things that one has done, realizing that one has failed, that you have let yourself down and your poor silly disciples down and mankind down, that the God in you has deserted you—that was the ultimate torment. Even on the cross I remember shouting out something about it.”
“Eli. Eli, lama sabachthani?” I said.
“Did someone get that down?” he replied.
“Don’t you read the Gospels?”
“Good God, No!” he said. “How can I? I was crucified before all that.”
“But you seem to know how things have gone?”
“It was plain enough how they were going.”
“Don’t you,” I asked rather stupidly, forgetting where we were, “keep yourself informed about terrestrial affairs?”
“They crucify me daily,” he said. “I know that. Yes.”
2.
Then without any sign of compunction, with that easy inconsistency which is so natural in the Dreamland atmosphere, he dropped the pose of knowing nothing of the Gospels and began to discuss them with the acutest penetration. He experimented with one explanation.
“People get here, good religious gentle beings, bringing the books they believe in. I talk to them because they are often so right-hearted that it perplexes me to find how wrong-headed they can be.
“Though I saw things going wrong after my crucifixion…”
That was not good enough. He went further and re-told the story of the Resurrection…
“I saw that fellow Paul. That story is quite true. I fainted but I didn’t die, and that dear old Joseph of Arimathea put me away in his own private sepulcher. Matthew’s Gospel exaggerates about its being sealed and watched, and Mark, Luke and John came nearer the facts. I was put away by Joseph and Nicodemus, among a lot of spices and comforts, there was food and wine and fruit and even some money, and when I awoke I was disgusted beyond measure to realise I was not dead. I sat there eating, because I was exhausted, and wondering what I had best do. Perhaps after all our Heavenly Father had a use for me, and, like yourself, I have never been willing to die. I would just obliterate myself for a time and think things over. You know something of that feeling.”
