Myths about Dreams
In one type of romantic adventure the hero flies, or rides on a white horse, to another world, where he meets a princess. This romantic adventure becomes an explicit dream adventure when the hero finds his princess after falling asleep or when he visits her magically every night. Implicitly, however, one might regard all “other worlds” as dream worlds and all romantic adventures as paradigms of the dream of sexual adventure. In these ways, the romantic adventure and the dream adventure often overlap; one such combination results in the myth of the shared dream.
In some versions of the romantic adventure, the hero succeeds in rescuing the dream princess and bringing her back to his own world; the Sleeping Beauty is such a story, and the Brothers Grimm collected many others, in which everyone lives happily ever after. In other versions, however, the hero fails to keep his princess in the real world; the Swan Maiden (as in the ballet Swan Lake) is such a story,1 and many more are preserved in the Greek myths, which usually do not have happy endings. We might view these two variants as representative of two attitudes to the reality of the dream world: the first regards it as a real world, from which one can bring back the princess and keep her, just as Bellerophon kept his bridle; the other regards the dream girl as a mere figment of the imagination, which fades when one wakes up, as the tiger faded from Ramakrishna’s dream. In other words, if the prince regards his experience in the other world as a real experience, he brings back his princess; if he regards it as a dream, he does not bring her back.
In India, however, these two themes are combined, since there is no impermeable boundary between dream and reality. Here the hero acknowledges that his dream was “just” a dream—but he still succeeds in bringing back his princess. Indeed, when he finds her, he may find that she has been dreaming of him; the Sleeping Beauty may well have been also a Dreaming Beauty, dreaming that her prince would come to awaken her with a kiss.
The story of the dream adventure may itself be subdivided into two variants. In the first, a man dreams of a woman he has never seen, searches for her, finds her, and marries her. This tale, probably originating in India, was carried to Ireland, Russia, medieval Greece, France, and Germany; Chaucer ridicules it in the tale of Sir Topas, who dreams that he is to marry the queen of fairyland and wanders off to search for her. The motif, which Stith Thompson calls “Future husband (wife) revealed in dream,” otherwise known as D 1812.3.9,2 is also related to “Youth makes statue of a girl and seeks a girl like the statue” (T 11.2.1.1). This is a popular romantic theme, with an Indo-European distribution pattern.
But the second version of the story is, to my present knowledge, the special achievement of India and of the lands with which India had direct contact. This is the theme of two lovers, unknown to each other, who dream of each other and subsequently find each other in waking life. The broader form of the motif, “Love through dreams” (T 11.3), which corresponds to our first version, occurs widely and is even identifiable as an entire Tale Type (516): “Falling in love with a person seen in a dream.” But the more specific inflection, our second version, “Lovers meet in their dreams” (T 11.3.1), is attested only in Indian folklore.3
One of the simplest as well as one of the earliest examples of this second version is a Persian story that occurs in both the Shahnamah and the Zend Avesta; thus it is part of a literature that dates back to the Indo-Iranian period, in which India and Persia shared many major literary and religious themes:
Zairivairi . . . was the handsomest man of his time, just as Odatis, the daughter of King Omartes, was the most beautiful woman among the Iranians. They saw each other in a dream and fell in love. The princess was invited to a great feast at which she had to make her choice and throw a goblet to the young noble who pleased her. When she failed to see Zairivairi, she left the room in tears; but then she saw a man in Scythian attire at the door of the palace, and she recognized the hero of her dreams. It was Zairivairi.4
The woman in the dream must defend her private sense of reality against great social pressure, must hang on to her vision for a long time before, finally, she is supported by physical evidence that others can see—here, the appearance of the dream prince himself, in the flesh at last, to tell her that he, too, had dreamed of them together.
A far more elaborate story of a shared dream is the myth of Vikramāditya and Malayavatī:
A painter copied an image of a girl from a traveler’s book. King Vikramāditya saw the picture and fell in love with the girl. That night he dreamed that he was making love to the girl, but suddenly the watchman woke him up. The king banished the watchman in a rage; he was convinced that the girl existed, though he despaired of finding her. He told his friend about his dream: “I crossed the sea and entered a beautiful city full of armed maidens who rushed at me, shouting, ‘Kill him! Kill him!’ Then a Buddhist nun took me to her house and said, ‘This is a man-hating princess named Malayavatī; she makes her maidens kill any man she sees.’ The princess entered the nun’s house with her maidens, and I put on woman’s clothing and came out to see her: she was the princess I had seen in the picture. As soon as she saw me, she forgot her hatred of men and was overpowered by desire, even though I had the form of a woman. She took me back to her palace, where we played marriage games with her maidens; and when we had been married, that night we entered the bridal chamber. I told her who I was and revealed myself and embraced her, and she lost all modesty as I began to make love with her. As we were passionately united, that cursed watchman woke me up. Now that I have seen Malayavatī in a picture and in a dream, I cannot live without her.”
The king’s friend, realizing that this was a true dream, told the king to draw a map of the city on a piece of cloth. He showed it to everyone, until one day a poet came from afar and told this tale: “In the city of Malaya, the king’s daughter, Malayavatī, hated men until she saw in a dream a certain man in a Buddhist house, and in her dream she brought him to her palace and married him and entered the bridal chamber with him. But just as she was making love with him in bed, she was awakened at dawn by her chambermaid. She fired the maid and vowed that she herself would die if she did not find that man in six months, of which five have now passed.” When the poet had told this tale, with all of its striking agreement and similarity, the king rejoiced in his certainty and set out for the city.
He found it just as the princess was about to enter the fire. When she saw him, she said, “This was my dream bridegroom,” and when Vikramāditya saw his beloved with his own eyes [sākṣāt], just as she had been in the picture and in his dream, he regarded it as a marvelous favor from the gods, and he took her back with him to his own city.5
What makes the story particularly striking is the mass of detail, “with all of its striking agreement and similarity” between the dream of Vikramāditya and the dream of Malayavatī. The two dreams weave together traditional elements from Indian romantic literature (the Buddhist nun as a go-between), Indian myths of illusion (the king’s change of sex, which in this story is merely a masquerade), and Indo-European folklore (the man-hating princess, the ice maiden—Turandot—who is melted by the ardor of the king). These themes correspond so precisely in the two dreams, and there are, in addition, so many identical small arbitrary facts (such as the proper names), that mere coincidence is out of the question.
King Vikramāditya is certain that his dream is real, and it is the dream, not the portrait of the princess, that convinces each of them of the other’s existence. For the dream has many details that the picture lacked, and the princess, who had only the dream and no picture, believed it just as firmly as Vikramāditya did. The story thus takes the conventional motif of the lovers who fall in love as a result of seeing each other’s portraits and brings it to another level of meaning. The king has yet another picture, the map, drawn after the dream, to back up his faith, and these two pieces of evidence supply physical corroborations for other people (the friend, the poet), who might otherwise have doubted the reality of the dream. Since Vikramāditya knows how to draw, he is able to turn his mental image into a physical object even before he finds the girl: he draws a map of his dream world.
A series of versions of another myth of this type demonstrates some of the ways in which the storytellers continually juggled the details relating to the physical verification of the shared dream. At first the emphasis is on the physical reality of the dream lover; then it shifts to his mental reality, then to the physical proof of that mental reality, and finally to the philosophical implications of that proof. Although this development is not strictly a chronological one, since some of the more subtle details appear in texts that are apparently older than those that contain simpler accounts, it is perhaps best to begin with the less elaborate versions of the myth and add details as they build up, bearing in mind that we are dealing with a fluid oral tradition that may be rather misleadingly and arbitrarily fixed in written texts from time to time.
The myth is the story of Uṣā and Aniruddha, and it is told in several Sanskrit texts. It is retold often, in part because it is an integral part of the much-loved saga of Kṛṣṇa (for Aniruddha is the son of Kṛṣṇa’s son Pradyumna, whom we will encounter in chapter three in a tale of magical doubles), and in part because it is the kind of story that Hindus like to tell, a story about dreams that come true. It is useful to regard this tale together with the story of Vikramāditya and Malayavatī, because it presents a kind of mirror-image of that myth. Vikramāditya’s story is told from his point of view, and the woman is depicted as bloodthirsty and causelessly violent toward him; but Uṣā’s story is told from the woman’s point of view, and the hero’s entrance into her bedroom is seen, in some versions, as a bloody and violent rape.
The simplest (though not the oldest) variant tells the story in considerable detail:
The demon Bāṇa had a daughter, Uṣā, who, though a virgin, dreamed that she made love with a man she had never seen or heard of before. But when, on waking, she failed to see him, she cried out, “Where are you, darling?” She felt confused and then, in the midst of her friends, embarrassed. She told her friend Citralekhā about her dream, and Citralekhā said, “If he exists in the triple world, I will bring to you the man who stole your heart; point him out.” Then Citralekhā drew pictures of all the gods, demons, human beings, and other creatures in the universe. When Uṣā saw the picture of Aniruddha, she lowered her head in embarrassment, smiled, and said, “That’s the one! That’s the one!” Citralekhā, who had yogic powers, recognized Aniruddha and flew through the air to get him; she brought him, asleep, to Uṣā, who rejoiced to see him. He awoke, and they made love in her room until Aniruddha lost count of the days. When she lost her virginity, the servants noticed this by means of signs that were hard to conceal, and they told her father, the king, “Your majesty, we have noticed behavior on the part of your daughter that is defiling the family; the virgin has been violated by men.” When the king heard this, he hastened to the girl’s room, where he saw Aniruddha playing dice with her. Furious, Bāṇa bound Aniruddha with serpent bonds, but Nārada reported Aniruddha’s capture to Pradyumna and Kṛṣṇa. A great battle took place; Kṛṣṇa conquered Bāṇa and took Aniruddha and Uṣā back to his capital, at Dvārakā.6
Since Uṣā apparently lacks Vikramāditya’s skill in draftsmanship, Citralekhā helps her. Citralekhā’s name means “Sketcher of Pictures,” and her art is a magic one: she draws a map of the universe in which Uṣā can pinpoint her man like a witness leafing through the pages of faces in the police rogue’s gallery to identify a criminal. Uṣā believes in her dream from the very start; Citralekhā, however, is not entirely sure that the man exists until Uṣā is able to identify him as a man whom Citralekhā knows to exist. The element of physical corroboration reappears near the end of the story, when the physical signs of loss of virginity alert the harim guards and convince them, too, that Uṣā’s dream man truly exists. It is significant, however, that this corroboration occurs only after Aniruddha himself has been transported to the harim. Thus Uṣā is convinced by the dream that Aniruddha exists; Citralekhā is convinced by the picture (even though it is a picture that she has drawn herself); and the guards are convinced by the signs “difficult to conceal”: marks on Uṣā’s body, perhaps—a common theme in Indian erotic poetry—or blood or semen on the bed—a common theme in myths of dream seductions.
The presence of semen in the bed of a man who has dreamt of a sexual adventure is a better-known example of the ambiguous physical evidence of the reality of a dream.7 For an orgasmic dream or a wet dream is physically real; a real orgasm has taken place, inside and outside the body of the dreamer, and it seems at first to have happened more or less as it would have taken place had the dream partner been physically present. In another sense, however, the orgasmic dream is emotionally unreal; one has had a fantasy of an experience that cannot be entirely real without a partner. On waking, the dream reveals its unreality in the form of a heightened sense of loneliness. The orgasmic dream is in this sense the most solipsistic of illusory experiences. The semen is a biological fact, but it is proof only of the fantasy. Unlike other “things” that the hero brings back from the dream world, the semen cannot prove the physical existence of the person who caused it to be present in the dream—the lover from the other world. Like the dream itself, in Sanskrit philosophy, semen is “emitted” by the dreamer in one of the basic processes of illusory creation.
For a woman, blood replaces semen as evidence of a sexual dream. In the tale of Uṣā, the dream of Aniruddha leaves her with precisely this sort of ambiguous physical evidence. Being the daughter of a demon, Uṣā understands the ambiguity of magic; her father tries to capture her lover with magic ropes that are serpents, a reversal of the traditional metaphor of illusory perception: where we normally mistake ropes for serpents, demons make ropes out of serpents. These ropes then fall away, and in a later version of the myth they revert to their serpent nature and are destroyed by their natural enemy, the great Garuḍa bird on which Kṛṣṇa rides.8 The magic is undone so that natural physical forces can triumph.
The physical evidence of the dream lover is strengthened in another version of the myth of Uṣā:
One day when Śiva was making love with the Goddess Pārvatī, surrounded by hundreds of celestial nymphs, the best of the nymphs, named Citralekhā, took the form of the Goddess and charmed Śiva, and the Goddess laughed, and all the nymphs laughed. Now, Uṣā, the daughter of Bāṇa, saw Śiva making love with the Goddess, and right in front of Pārvatī she made a wish, thinking, “How fortunate are women who make love with their husbands.” Pārvatī, knowing her mind, said to her, “Uṣā, you will soon make love with your husband, just as I make love with Śiva.” When she heard this, Uṣā worried and said in her heart, “When will I make love with my husband?” Then Pārvatī laughed and said, “Listen, Uṣā. On the twelfth night of the bright half of the month of Vaiśākha, a man will rape you in a dream, and he will be your husband.”
Indeed, on the very night that the Goddess had spoken of, a man raped Uṣā in a dream, for he had been incited to this act by the Goddess. As he entered Uṣā, she screamed; smeared with blood, she wept and arose suddenly in the night, terrified. Then she said to her friend Citralekhā, “Now that I have been defiled in this way, what will I tell my father? I think it would be better for me to die now than to live.” As she went on weeping, her friends all said to her, “Your mind has not been defiled. If a person breaks a vow of chastity in the course of a dream [or sleep, svapna], the vow is not broken. You have committed no sin. You are a chaste woman, and since this happened to you while you were asleep, no dharma has been violated.”
Citralekhā said to Uṣā, “Uṣā, don’t you remember what the Goddess promised you in Śiva’s presence? So what are you crying about?” Then Uṣā remembered and was no longer sad, but she said, “If this man is to be my husband, how can we know him?” And Citralekhā said, “The man who stole sexual pleasure from you in your dream was someone whom you had never seen or heard of before. So how could we know him? That man who entered the harim and took you by force cannot be an ordinary [prākṛta] man, for not even the gods can enter this well-guarded citadel. You are lucky to have such a husband given to you by the Goddess. But now you must find out who his father is and what his name is.”
Then the nymph Citralekhā sketched for seven nights, drawing all the gods and demons and demigods and serpents in the world of men, and she showed them all in order to Uṣā. Bewildered and deluded by lust, Uṣā saw Aniruddha; her eyes grew wide in amazement, and she said, “That is the thief who defiled me in my dream. I recognize him. What is his name?” Citralekhā told Uṣā that it was Aniruddha. She then flew to Aniruddha and found him in his harim, drinking wine and making love to all the women. For a moment she worried about how she could manage things, but then she wrapped him in darkness by her magic power, and he vanished from the midst of his women in the harim. She flew with him through the sky and brought him to Uṣā, who was amazed to see him.9
Citralekhā and Uṣā appear now not only in the main story but in a prelude that provides a frame for the actual event. After that prelude, they recall the Goddess’s promise as one more piece of evidence supporting the reality of the dream. This text also includes a laconic but striking discussion of that reality. When Uṣā says that she has been ruined because she dreamed that she was raped, Citralekhā regards this as a physical fact. She comments on the man’s extraordinary prowess in getting past the harim guards, which implies that she feels that he was physically there; she also insists, quite sensibly, that Uṣā find out what sort of family he comes from, so that she can begin to make suitable marriage arrangements. Yet that very statement—that the man must have been extraordinary to have gotten into the harim—could mean precisely the opposite: it could mean that no real flesh-and-blood man could have gotten in, that only a figment of Uṣā’s imagination could have managed it. This same ambiguity characterizes the further discussion of the implications of the rape. The blood that appears on Uṣā’s body after her dream is taken as a specific example of the “signs of intercourse” more vaguely mentioned in the first text as material proof of the reality of the event. Yet Uṣā’s friends argue that a rape in a dream is not a real rape, not because it is not physically a rape, but rather because it is not mentally a rape. The ambiguity of the word svapna leaves undecided the question of whether the women are arguing that one is not responsible for the thoughts in one’s dreams or that one is not responsible for the things that are physically done to one when one is asleep. Perhaps both implications are intended. In any case, according to this text Uṣā was raped during the dream, not during the later, physical visit of Aniruddha.
Aniruddha is not literally asleep when Citralekhā finds him, though his senses are muddled by wine and sex. One manuscript tradition inserts a suggestive variant at this point: when Citralekhā brings Aniruddha to Uṣā, he remarks, “I have never seen this place before, but often, in the night, I used to dream that I saw such a great city with its harim full of maidens. And now you have helped me to come to precisely this place.”10 This passage hints at the answer to a problem that hovers over the other variants of the tale. The story of Uṣā as we have it in these first texts is not literally a shared dream, for, though Aniruddha is asleep when Citralekhā finds him, he wakes up either right then or in Uṣā’s presence, and it is not said that he was dreaming of Uṣā. However, the wider context of Indian stories in which heroes fly to demonic women in the other world suggests that we might regard the entire story as Aniruddha’s dream of Uṣā’s dream of him.
This hypothesis, which is supported by the passage in which Aniruddha expresses his sense of déjà vu, is vindicated by the final and most baroque of all the versions of the tale of Uṣā and Aniruddha. This text, considerably later than the others, certainly cannot be used to prove that the story was always meant to be a story of Aniruddha’s dream, but it does show that at least one Hindu author felt that the story could be placed within that genre.
Aniruddha was the son of Kāma [the god of erotic love] incarnate as Pradyumna. One day, as he was lying asleep on a bed covered with flowers, he saw in a dream a young woman lying on a bed of flowers. Her face was lustful, and the wind blew her clothes aside to reveal that she was on fire between her legs. When Aniruddha saw her, his mind was churned by lust [kāma], and he said to her, “Are you a goddess or a nymph? Whose wife or daughter are you? Whom do you desire? I am Aniruddha the son of Kāma, in the prime of youth, full of lust and a past master at the erotic arts [Kāma-śāstra]. Let me make love to you; I am very good at it.” But since she was a virgin, she was shy about making love. She looked at him out of the corner of her eye and said, “If you are so full of lust, why don’t you get married? I am Uṣā, the daughter of Bāṇa. A woman is never independent; she is dependent on others. A whore may be independent, but not a good woman. A father gives away a woman to a suitable bridegroom; a maiden does not choose her own bridegroom. You and I are well suited. If you want me, ask Bāṇa for me—or ask Śiva or Pārvatī.” And then the woman vanished, and the boy woke up, full of lust, obsessed with lust, though he realized that it had been a dream.
Aniruddha stopped eating and sleeping, and when Rati and the other wives of Kṛṣṇa told Kṛṣṇa about it, Kṛṣṇa laughed and said, “The daughter of Bāṇa once saw the loveplay of Śiva and Pārvatī and became disturbed by lust. Then the Goddess granted Uṣā’s wish: she made Aniruddha see a dream that clouded his mind. Now I will cloud the mind of Bāṇa’s daughter with a dream.” And then Kṛṣṇa, who knows all forms of magic, made Uṣā see a dream. As she slept on a bed of flowers, she saw a handsome man in the prime of youth, and she fell in love with him and said to him, “Who are you, lover? Make love to me, for I am tortured with desire. I have just reached womanhood and am longing for my first taste of sex, and I am in love with you. Marry me by the Gandharva marriage ritual of mutual consent, the easiest of all eight forms of marriage.” But he said, “I am the grandson of Kṛṣṇa and the son of Kāma. How can I take you, my darling, without the permission of those two?” And as he said this, he vanished. Overpowered by lust when she could no longer see her lover, Uṣā woke up and arose from her bed and wept.
When Uṣā stopped eating and sleeping, her friend Citralekhā told Bāṇa and his wife about Uṣā’s condition. The queen wept, and Bāṇa fainted dead away. But when Śiva heard Citralekhā’s report, he laughed, remembering the Goddess’s boon and Kṛṣṇa’s role in sending the dream, and he told Citralekhā to bring Aniruddha to Uṣā. Citralekhā went to Dvārakā to summon Aniruddha as he slept; she brought him in a chariot while he was still asleep. Then she awakened him, and by her magic and her yogic powers she brought him to Uṣā in the harim, though it was well guarded. She awakened Uṣā; and when Uṣā saw her husband, she rejoiced. He married her with the Gandharva ritual, and they made love for a long time. The son of Kāma was so full of lust [kāma] that he did not know night from day, and Uṣā fainted away at the very touch of the man.
After a long time, the guards went to Bāṇa and said, “These are evil times. Citralekhā has served as the go-between and brought a handsome hero to Uṣā. Now your daughter Uṣā is pregnant; her body is marked by nails all over, and she makes love with her lover all the time.” When Bāṇa heard this, he was ashamed and angry, and he determined to attack, despite Śiva’s attempts to persuade him to let Uṣā marry Aniruddha. “For,” Bāṇa replied, “the guard said, ‘Your daughter is pregnant,’ right in front of the whole assembly, and those words still burn like poison in my ears.” The battle took place, and Kṛṣṇa brought Uṣā and Aniruddha back to Dvārakā.11
This story begins with Aniruddha’s dream, to which Uṣā’s dream is merely a response. Aniruddha dreams of himself as lustful and his bride as chaste; her dream is the opposite. When she quotes Dharma-śāstra to him in his dream, he quotes it right back to her in her dream. The dreams are thus not so much the same dream as reciprocal dreams, two different views of the same encounter. Aniruddha realizes explicitly that his dream was nothing but a dream, not a true encounter with a woman; the physical evidence is then provided not by the dream but by his physical reaction to the dream: he stops eating and sleeping (and hence, we may suppose, he does not dream any more). This evidence then causes the report of the dream; Aniruddha’s mother tells Kṛṣṇa, just as the guards tell Bāṇa of Uṣā’s dream in the other versions. In those versions there is physical evidence of intercourse. Here there is no such evidence, in either Aniruddha or Uṣā; but she too stops eating and sleeping, so they share their lovesick behavior. Citralekhā can carry the story to Bāṇa without betraying Uṣā, for evidently Citralekhā regards Uṣā’s chastity as intact, as indeed it is: in this version, Uṣā and Aniruddha do not make love in their dreams; they merely express their love and their lust, and they argue within themselves, as well as with each other, about the measures they should take to make their dream come true.
The reason for their ambivalence is stated by Śiva when he tells the story: “When she saw the young man in her dream, Uṣā was full of desire but was restrained by her awe of dharma” Still, Bāṇa faints away at the knowledge of his daughter’s mental state. (This is a reversal of the argument in our second text, where Uṣā’s friends reassure her, when she was raped in a dream, that her mind is pure even if her body has been defiled.) But when Aniruddha finally reaches the harim and physically marries Uṣā, the guards report to Bāṇa as they do in the earlier versions, and this time they cite the ultimate in undeniable physical proof of intercourse: they say that Uṣā is pregnant. They also add that her body is marked by nails, making explicit what may have been implicit in the other texts that referred to “signs of intercourse” after Uṣā had dreamed of making love with Aniruddha and “signs hard to conceal” after she had actually made love with him. Though Uṣā has in fact married Aniruddha by the Gandharva ritual (an informal ceremony consisting of nothing but sexual consummation), Śiva suggests that she still might have a formal wedding to save the family honor, but Bāṇa will not hear of it. Thus Śiva moves inward from the outer frame (the curse-boon of Pārvatī) into the inner frame (the conversation with Bāṇa), even as Citralekhā and Uṣā move out of the inner frame into the outer frame in the second version. Śiva is aware of both sets of dreams, as is Kṛṣṇa, though the human lovers, once awakened by Citralekhā, do not care whether they are awake or dreaming. Where the other texts said that they lost count of the days, here they cannot even tell whether it is day or night.
Another example of an Indian tale of this genre appears in a short story called “The Brushwood Boy,” written by Rudyard Kipling in 1898. I think I am justified in calling it Indian, both because Kipling knew Indian literature (and had an Indian nurse) and because it uses many Indian themes—in British transformation:
A young boy dreamed all his life about a girl whom he met beside a pile of brushwood in a place called the City of Sleep; there, beside the Lily Lock of the Sea of Dreams, he rode with her along the Thirty-Mile Ride until a Policeman called Day awakened him. He grew up, and the girl in his dream became a woman with black hair that grew into a widow’s peak. He joined the cavalry in India, played polo, and became a popular officer; but he never kissed a woman. He drew a map of the place in his dream (“Im gettin’ the hang of the geography of that place,” he said to himself, as he shaved next morning), and kept it up to date, for he was a most methodical person.
As he was travelling home by ship, an older woman whom he had met on the ship stole into his cabin and kissed him as he slept. That night, he dreamed that the girl by the Sea of Dreams kissed him, and as he woke up, “he could almost have sworn that the kiss was real.” He returned to his parents’ home in England, where he heard a girl singing a song about the Sea of Dreams, the City of Sleep, and the Policeman called Day. He came into the room and saw her—the black hair in the widow’s peak, with that peculiar ripple over the right ear; there was also the small, well-cut mouth that had kissed him. But she did not recognize him.
Then they went riding together, and after a wild gallop he told her of his dream, with details (such as the Thirty-Mile Ride) that she had not mentioned in her song. (“I know I didn’t. I have never told a living soul.”) She burst into tears and asked, “Am I mad?” and he replied, “Not unless I’m mad as well.” Finally, as they continued to compare details of the dream, she cried out, “Then you’re the Boy—my Brushwood Boy, and I’ve known you all my life!” When she asked him what it meant, he said, “This! Perhaps when we die we may find out more, but it means this now.” After he kissed her, he told her of the time he had kissed her before, in his dream; she told him that she had dreamt, that same night, that another woman had kissed him. But he denied ever having kissed anyone before, and they rode home happily together to be married.12
The thrilling gallop side by side is Kipling’s version of the dream image of flying through the air with a female magician or on a winged horse; the woman who comes to the hero and kisses him in his sleep is the dangerous succubus, who threatens his careful chastity, while the innocent girl in England is the other aspect of the shadow woman in the other world, the princess who is his reward, not his temptation. Set against the unemotional banality of the life of the upper classes in Victorian England, the dreams are made out of that very same banality—dreams of quiet downs and well-bred ponies and a solid British bobby (the enemy who awakens them, as the watchman and the maid awaken Vikramāditya and Malayavatī). The only thing that makes the dream exciting is the fact that it is a shared dream, a shared map of an imaginary country (that this map becomes a real map when the dreamer is in India may well be an indication that Kipling was aware of the story’s ancestry). Kipling’s hero draws the map, as a good English officer would do, but then he shows it to no one; it remains a private document, like the dream itself, shutting him up in his solipsistic romance until, one assumes, he can show it to the girl. The girl is at first terrified when she realizes that her dream is a shared dream, and even the smug young officer expresses tentative intimations of another world.13 As in other examples of this genre, the girl is less certain of the waking world—she does not recognize him as quickly as he recognizes her—and is more aware of the interpenetration of the two worlds: she knows that a real woman also kissed him on the night that he dreamt of kissing her, though he denies it.14
In Kipling’s story (as in many Indo-European stories of the simpler version of the romantic adventure), the hero rides on a horse. In most of the Indian stories, the hero flies through the air to the woman in the other world. The image of the winged horse—Bellerophon’s Pegasus again—provides a convenient synthesis of the two versions: the hero rides and flies. Riding is a perfectly realistic thing to do; flying is not. Yet, as we have seen, dreams (and stories) do not make a firm distinction between what is and what is not possible. Flying and riding may be, as Freud suggested, two closely related dream metaphors for sexual passion; in any case, they seem to serve an identical function in tales of sexual adventure.
Shared Dreams and Archetypal Myths
What is the meaning of the shared dream? How can it happen that two people share the same dream? Why do people write stories about people who share the same dream? The answer to all of these questions begins, I think, in our recognition of the human terror of solipsism. The shared dream functions in India as a powerful symbol of unfathomable intimacy. When Queen Līlā converses with the goddess Sarasvatī, who has flown with her through the air to visit her husband (as Citralekhā brought Aniruddha to Uṣā), their conversation is said to be “like the conversation of people who have had the same wishes and dreams,” and the modern commentary suggests that, “In the world, by the grace of god etc., two people sometimes have the same dream, like Uṣā and Aniruddha.”15 The commentator explains his point by citing a story, in traditional Indian fashion, and it is, I think, significant that he cites the story of Uṣā and Aniruddha as an example of a shared dream. He may be referring to the most baroque Hindu variant, in which Aniruddha’s dream precedes Uṣā’s, or to the underlying pattern that persists in atavistic details even in variants of the tale in which Aniruddha does not, in fact, reciprocate Uṣā’s dream.
Roger Caillois has described the appeal of the shared dream:
Nothing is more personal than a dream, nothing else so imprisons a person in irremediable solitude, nothing else is as stubbornly resistant to the possibility of being shared. In the world of reality everything is susceptible to universal test. The dream, on the other hand, is an adventure that only the dreamer himself has experienced and which only he can remember; it is a water-tight, impenetrable world which precludes the least chance of crosschecking. The temptation now arises to believe that two or more persons (or even a whole multitude) may at times have the same dream or have dreams that are parallel or complementary. The dreams would thus be corroborated, fitted together like the pieces of a puzzle and, by acquiring in this way the solidity and stability possessed by the perceptions of the waking world, would be verifiable like them and, even better, would create certain bonds between the dreamers—secret, narrow, restricted, and imperious bonds.16
The dream that becomes verifiable, passing scientific tests, is in some ways the opposite of the dream shared by only two people; the former becomes part of the accepted knowledge of the world, while the latter, by very virtue of being denied by all the rest of the world, is what links the two who share it. The dream of Vikramāditya and Malayavatī partakes of both aspects: at first, it is only their mutual love that binds the two dreamers, but when both of them make public their dreams, a general belief in the truth of the shared dream arises in the public at large. The dream of Kipling’s lovers remains private forever, for they are English. At the other extreme, certain philosophical Indian texts that we will encounter in chapter five use the motif of the shared dream as the starting point from which to develop a variant of the argument of pure idealism: the world that we regard as public (shared) is in fact merely the manifestation of a single mental image, a private dream dreamed by God and shared by all of us. These texts thus invoke an outer frame that is soft—like the theological frame invoked, in a far weaker way, in the second version of the tale of Uṣā and Aniruddha—in order to harden the reality of the shared dream. The words of the god corroborate the images of the dream; one does not need a dream to corroborate the reality of the god.
The hypothesis that there may be dreams that are shared by a number of different people (the “multitude” of which Caillois speaks) underlies a phenomenon found throughout the world: the use of “dream books,” that is, textbooks or codebooks that decipher the meanings of dreams, of which we have seen examples in the Hindu texts. The fact that generalizations of this sort can be made at all implies an awareness that certain themes and motifs recur in dreams recorded at different times and in different places. It also involves the implicit assumption that these dreams will in fact be recorded, that they will be told. This awareness also underlies our own depth psychologies’ interest in the meaning and sharing of dreams. Though Freud and Jung differed considerably about whether the same dream, dreamed by two different people, had the same meaning (or was, in a deeper sense, the same dream at all), both admitted that there are, indeed, typical or perhaps even universal dreams and that these pose special problems of interpretation over and above the problem of relating the dream to the life of the specific dreamer.
These universal dreams, the stuff that dream books are made of, are shared in quite a different sense from the shared dreams of the Indian lovers. The universal or archetypal dreams are shared because different people have dreamt the same things and have told one another about it; the lovers’ dreams are shared because different people have dreamt the same things and have dreamt about each other. This true reciprocity is further enhanced by a far greater amount of detail in the Indian stories than in the archetypal dreams. The universal dreams share a few basic motifs, which are explained either by universal human experiences or (in the Jungian system) by the inheritance of a few archetypal symbols arising out of those experiences.
Indian philosophy includes within its expansive bounds several concepts quite comfortably compatible with a theory of archetypes. The extreme form of Vedānta, which maintains that no physical matter is real, is particularly amenable to such an interpretation. For if there is a rope on the path, there is no need to invoke archetypes to explain why we might mistake it for a snake; a snake does look very much like a rope. But if there is no rope there, why should we all think of a snake? Because, perhaps, we are all born with archetypal images of snakes in our heads. Thus it is said that “similar sayings appear in the minds of many people.”17 Even more impressive is the Yogavāsiṣṭha’s assertion that men of great enterprise are able to contract together and do business by relying on pure chance and the power of the (collective) karmic memory traces in the mind of each one.18 Apparently they all imagine the same contracts, the same lawyers, the same assets and liabilities, and agree on the imaginary price. Similarly, it is said that “Many men see the same dream; many little boys play the same game.”19 Mass hallucinations are also attested in the West: “Hallucinations can be socially determined, and there are cases of many people ‘Witnessing’ together events which never occurred.”20 But such phenomena, which we regard as rare and aberrational, are easily accommodated by the basic Indian line of thought:
There is no objective datum which forms the common ground for the illusory perception of all people. Just as when ten persons see in the darkness a rope and having the illusion of a snake there, run away, and agree in their individual perceptions that they have all seen the same snake, though each really had his own illusion and there was no snake at all, [just so do we constantly share in a common illusion of the universe].21
Ironically, this argument now renders superfluous and meaningless the search for consensual authority to corroborate the reality of the shared dream, since, even if two people agree, both can be wrong.
The Rêve à Deux in Psychoanalysis
When we contrast archetypal dreams with our Indian narratives of shared dreams, we see that what the lovers share are not, in fact, archetypes but manifestations; that is, what they share are not general symbols or even the learned symbols of their shared culture but, rather, a number of striking, cumulative, exact details. These shared dreams are not “parallel” or “complementary” dreams, for one lover sees the exact buildings, the exact clothes, hears the exact same words, and spends the exact same amount of time in the adventure as the other sees, hears, and experiences.
An explanation of this phenomenon was suggested by the psychoanalyst Jules Eisenbud, who interpreted what he called “a telepathic rêve à deux” dreamt by two of his patients. The first dreamt that she was walking in a heavy downpour and took shelter at the home of her neighbor; the second patient dreamt, on a subsequent night, that the first patient sought refuge in her home from a heavy downpour. It might well be argued that there is so little detail in the coincidence of the two dreams that they qualify only for the more general level of our theme, the basic sorts of things that people tend to dream about: rain, night, and being lost. But Eisenbud regarded it as a more striking phenomenon, a truly shared dream, and he tried to explain it:
Once we admit the possibility of telepathic activity in dreams, we are no longer at liberty to assume that a given dream is exclusively the private concern of the dreamer who had it, since analysis is capable of demonstrating that one dream may be the vehicle for the latent material of two, three, or more individuals, or that two dreams are essentially one, existing separately only in the way that two intelligence agents may carry separately the complementary details of a plan which can be understood only when both sections are viewed together.22
The elements of this plan are broken down like the pieces of the puzzle that Caillois referred to. The separate bits of the broken message correspond to the separate versions of a myth that combine to make a statement that no single version of the myth can make.23 For dreams, as for myths, there is a master plan. But whose plan is it? Since the analyst is the only one who can understand the two dreams, he is evidently the master spy, the double agent, the one who (through transference and countertransference) has mediated between the two dreamers, allowing them to dream of each other through him. In this way he provides the outer frame for their dreams, just as God provides such a frame for the Indian nested dreams. In medieval Indian theology, God is inside the dreamer in a way similar to the way that (in the myths) lovers are inside each other or that (in the psychoanalytic scenario) the analyst is inside the patient. God is the witness of all dreamers, and he is the dreamer of the universal dream, on the outside; but he participates erotically on the inside as well. He is an actor in the drama—a character in the dream—as well as the author—the analyst of the dream.
An even more explicit example of the role of the psychoanalyst as a medium for telepathic dreams—or as a god—comes from Géza Róheim, one of whose patients reported having dreamt the following dream:
“I am still at home . . . and I am in time for next day’s analysis. I have had a dream which I am going to tell the analyst. The dream was this: A white dove alights on a pink cloud. I see this, and the sky is blue. I come into analysis, enter the room, but the couch stands crosswise. You begin to talk instead of letting me talk, and you say, ‘I dreamed that a white dove alights on a pink cloud. The sky was blue.’ I am so happy.”24
This is both a nested dream (a type that we will see in chapter five) and a dream about a shared dream. But the plot thickens when Róheim explains the analytic frame in which it occurred:
The patient dreamed this the same night that I was thinking about the problem of telepathy, a subject I had never been interested in before. . . . It is obvious that she dreamed of having dreamed the same thing that I had, that is, we have before us a telepathic dream on the subject of telepathy.25
Thus the analyst provides the hard frame that enables the patient to make the dream real; he is the spiritual master who makes dreams come true.
But psychoanalysis takes advantage of yet another time-honored way of hardening dreams: by telling them. Like Roger Caillois, Charles Rycroft is aware of the great need that people have to tell their dreams to someone else, but he sees this need as doomed to inevitable frustration:
While dreaming we appear to enter a world of our own . . . but we can share none of this with anyone else. We can, it is true, tell our dreams to someone else and, if we are lucky, his imaginative response to them may give us the illusion of a shared experience. But if the person we tell a dream to turns out to be a sceptic, we have no means of convincing him that we really did have the dream we have told him. If he asks for proof that we had that precise dream and no other one, that we have remembered it correctly, we cannot give it. We cannot ask the people who appeared in the dream to confirm our story. Unlike the events of everyday life, which can, in principle, be confirmed or otherwise by the laws of evidence, and unlike the events of our intimate personal relationships, which can be confirmed or otherwise by reference to the identical or reciprocal responses of the other, dream experiences have a peculiar privacy about them, which can only be partially and often only self-deceptively reduced by recounting them to others.26
Yet in the Indian stories, as we have seen, people do “ask the people who appeared in the dream to confirm” the reality of the dream, and in doing this they combine two things that in our society are, as Rycroft points out, separate: first, the “imaginative response” to the telling, which gives the mere “illusion of the shared experience”—a sharing on the most general level; and second, the offering of an “identical or reciprocal response,” which may be given by someone with whom we are intimate. This is the force of the lovers’ rêve à deux, for here the dream is told to the one person in the world close enough to be inside the dreamer, the one person who does not need to be told the dream in order to know it.
Telling and sharing the dream are what convince the individual dreamer that he is not mad, as he otherwise fears he may be. This may also be true of Tantric yogins, as viewed by the Hindu psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar:
The tantric imaginative reality is not the personal, imaginary reality of the psychotic. . . . The imaginative reality created by tantric exercises is both shared and public in the sense that it is based upon, guided and formed by the symbolic, iconic network of the tantric culture which the adept inhabits. In other words, if tantric visualizations are conscious dream creations, then they are dreams which have been dreamed by others.27
This is what happens when mystics unionize, as it were—when antisocial rebels form a society. Yet the experience that is captured by this group is, in a very basic sense, one that can never be described in words. This belief is expressed in a poem by a medieval Islamic poet:
Different he is from us, different and unseen,
and his story is different from all others.
Like the dumb one who had a dream,
who knows and understands and pines,
because he cannot tell his tale.28
The mystic experience of the ultimately real is perceived as a private dream that cannot be told or shared and as a dream that many mystics have tried in vain to tell about and share. Indeed, this very frustration—the urgent need to tell something, stifled by a paralytic inability to utter a sound—is in itself an archetypal dream experience.
When we do succeed in telling the dream, we feel that we have made it something public rather than private. In chapter one we attempted to distinguish public or cultural dreams from private or universal dreams. Public or cultural dreams are dreams that people are told about in a particular society and that they are encouraged to dream; private dreams are the dreams that people create out of their individual lives, often invoking universal human experiences and symbols. (Private elements—the unique factors in each human life—and universal elements—those basic events and basic perceptions of events that are attested all over the world—together bracket cultural dreams, which are neither individual nor universal.) The actual symbols that occur in many of the Indian stories and dream books—the teeth falling out, the ride on horseback, the nightmare of being dismembered or beheaded or blinded, the vision of the death of oneself or someone one loves—are private dream symbols that people do dream about; we know them from our own dreams or from the writings of Freud. These private dreams are, in a sense, universal. But the glosses on these dreams are public, cultural: in India, the dream of teeth falling out means that your son will die, whereas an American analyst might gloss it as symbolic of the dreamer’s own fear of impotence or as an expression of his hope of recovery: after all, when one lost one’s baby teeth, they grew back.29 And, as we have seen, universal and cultural dream images often appear side by side in a single text.
Myths are often made out of private dreams: “The core of the myth is a dream actually dreamt once upon a time by one person.”30 Dreams and myths alike draw their power from certain intense moments in actual human experience; but art transforms the private understanding of the dream into the public understanding of the myth. A myth is a private dream that has gone public. But dreams are also made out of myths,31 for people tend to dream not only about their lives but also about the myths they have been taught. Dreams incorporate into personal fantasy elements of traditional, shared mythology. The distinction between cultural and personal dreams may be initially useful, but it runs aground because of the mutual feedback between dreams and myths: a gives rise to b, but b gives rise to a. This paradox, like our riddle of the chicken and the egg, is expressed in India as the mystery of the seed and the tree. Indeed, it is more properly a triangular cybernetic process, for it connects myth and dream, myth and reality, and dream and reality.
Normally, we share our myths and many of our waking experiences; communication across those points of the triangle is easy enough. But in the rêve à deux we communicate from dream to dream, directly. The shared dream of lovers may be seen as the result of a kind of intense heightening of the basic bond that joins all humans. It has been suggested that “everybody’s unconscious perfectly understands everybody else’s unconscious” and that telepathic dreams occur because, “when persons are bound together emotionally, the tie of love opens one unconscious to another.”32 In this view, the flint of love strikes a spark that jumps from one mind to another. The events described in the Indian stories could be explained, in a similar way, as transformative mental events. It has been further suggested that the power of this emotional magnet extends across time as well as space, that there is some substantial force that, though not yet manifest, is already pregnant with the future, even as a ghost lingers by the grave of the past. This force is drawn to us across time and space, flowing backward against the current of material time in a way that cannot be measured with hard instruments or accounted for by our present scientific knowledge. In this view, just as the ghosts of people whom we have loved in the past may haunt our dreams, so too the shadows of people whom we will love in the future may first fall across our lives in our dreams.
The medium through which such transmissions could take place is the human substratum that links the universal dreams one to another, a kind of dream ether, an all-pervading substance in which we all move as fish move through water. In Jungian terms, this is the shared mental matrix of the human race; in Indian terms, it is Godhead. But dreams of this sort are, to my knowledge, recorded only in myths. That is, we do not have proof that people have such shared dreams; all we have is proof that people like to think that such a thing is possible.33 What is transmitted across the dream ether is therefore not dreams but myths. The dream ether is the warp that myths are woven on; the weft is individual human experience and art. Myths reflect our desire to believe that people really can dream the same dream, a desire that is a deep hope—a dream, if you will—that we all share. The myths that describe such experiences are shared dreams about shared dreams. The inner dream, told in the myth, is one in which love binds together inexplicably the hard and soft worlds of human perception. The outer dream is the myth, which nourishes our hope that it is possible to break out of the prison of our secret loneliness, to dream one another’s dreams.