W. B. Yeats’s Evocation of Dream Visions
While working on the section in my book about the use of in dreams for inspiring art and invention, I decided to fact check some of the more common claims about people who were inspired in their dreams. Not surprisingly, many of the scientists who it’s been claimed dreamt up their famous theories—such as Einstein’s dream of relativity or Niels Bohr’s of the structure of the atom—have no actual basis, perhaps suggesting the cultural desire to romanticize more inductive scientific processes.
This was less so the case with the artists. And I was very delighted to find that one of my favorite authors, who it is claimed wrote some of his poems and plays from dreams, was actually very indebted to dreams as part of his creative process, and in particular magically-induced dreams. This is W. B. Yeats, renowned Irish poet and member of the Order of the Golden Dawn.
I knew from his autobiographical essay, The Trembling of the Veil, that during his time with the GD, Yeats and his fellow occultists experimented with the use of dream incubation and shared dreams. But what I did not know was that Yeats developed an entire theory of Complementary Dreams, shared dreams that could be deliberately evoked in order to elicit true spiritual visions. And while I knew that Yeats and his wife George had used automatic writing to contact spirits in order to acquire an entire system of “metaphors for poetry,” they later turned to sleep and dream rituals, and over a four-year period recorded nine notebooks detailing their experiments with this form of oneiromantic mediumship.
Unfortunately, Yeats left no cohesive text on his oneiric methods, as dreaming was only a means to the articulation of his magical, psychological, and historical system published as A Vision. Despite this, the select writings on dreams found in his autobiographical essays, occult essays such as “Magic” and “Per Amica Silentia Lunae,” the first (1925) edition of A Vision, and the three volumes of Yeats’s Vision Papers that record the automatic script and sleep and dream experiments, paint a picture of Yeats as the last great oneiromantic practitioner before the magic of the night was hemmed in by the modern psychologization of dreams.
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George and William Butler Yeats |
The Evocation of Dreams
Yeats’s method for evoking dreams was adapted out the Golden Dawn teachings on meditation and evocation, but developed into a “new process” of his own invention: “I have a way of giving myself long meaning dreams, by meditating on a symbol when I go to sleep.” These symbols could be traditional occult symbols like those used by the GD or geometric patterns such intersecting rings of contrasting colors, but Yeats ultimately settled on the use of natural objects: certain flowers or leaves such as hawthorn placed on his pillow resulted in the clearest dream visions. During their sleep experiments, he and George also typically evoked dream states through burning sandalwood incense.
While these incubation methods were generally successful, they were not without difficulties when it came to incubating complementary dreams or dreams used for spirit mediumship. The method used for George to communicate with spirits in dreams involved her dreaming about the ghosts and then sleep talking their voices for Yeats to record. However, George’s personal dreams occasionally interfered or prevented her from speaking, such as a dream that her mouth was full of feathers. On several occasions she dreamt that she was a cat, requiring Yeats to pretend to be a dog or place a bowl of milk on the floor to redirect her animal urges.
Complementary Dreams
Yeats had experiences with shared dreams throughout his life, from experiments with sending mutual imagery with his uncle in his mid-30s, to a dream after performing a lunar ritual while staying at Tulira Castle of a centaur shooting the stars, and other guests reporting the same dream images in the morning. One of the most significant experiences of complementary dreams occurred in his later life when the spirits gave Yeats and George shared dream images that so impressed Yeats that he immortalized them in his poem “Towards Break of Day”: “Was it the double of my dream/ The woman that by me lay/ Dreamed, or did we halve a dream/ Under the first cold gleam of day?”
Yeats’s theory of “Complementary Dreams” was based on the observation that “When two people meditate upon the one theme, who have established a supersensual link, they will invariably…see pass before the mind's eye complementary images, images that complete one another.” Shared dreams are similar to telepathically transferred thoughts, but work through transferring an image rather than just the idea, and people with more fully developed ‘Celestial Bodies’ are stronger transmitters of dream images. Yeats also noted that the kind of shared vision or group mind experienced by occult covens (which he called their “unicorn”) is identical to shared dream images. While complementary dreams could occur incidentally, they could be cultivated through the building of mental and spiritual rapport between people (for instance those in shared symbolic belief systems or longterm relationships).
Dreams in the Personal Memory, the Phantasmagoria, and the Anima Mundi
The possibility of complementary dreams led Yeats to question whether they were transferred from his personal dreams, were a racial or spiritual memory, or “Had some great event taken place in some world where myth is reality and had we seen some portion of it?” Eventually the spirts explained that dreams come from all three sources: the spiritual memory of the ideal states we (and other spirits) experience between lives, symbols that our Personal Anima Mundi chooses from the Anima Mundi (the record of all events and myths) to guide us, or from the mechanical recording of sensory experiences by our Automatic Faculty. Like the contemporaneous theories of Freud, Yeats wrote that dreams represent our unconscious desires drawn from sensory memories of waking life. However, “We never in dreams see an image from our memory.” People, places, and events may appear similar to those of waking life, but they are (1) distorted by emotional and physical conditions such as anxiety and fatigue, and (2) are mediated by the experience of our own past lives and Personal Anima Mundi so that they appear clothed in abstract memory and allusion that allows personal memory to at the same time signify timeless spiritual truths and universal, archetypal patterns.
This imagistic intersection of the personal, past life, and mythic is a crucial part of understanding the magical nature of dreams and the poetic imagination for Yeats, and can be examined through the under-explained but interrelated concepts of the Phantasmagoria, Phantastikon, and Anima Mundi. For Yeats, the Phantasmagoria is the place in us where the real, the remembered, and the imagined coexist as projected images. It is the world inside of which artistic imagination occurs, but it is also a stage of the afterlife dominated by the imagination and through which the spirit exhausts its emotional attachments. The term Phantastikon seems to be another version of this: it is the imagistic awareness of our subconscious desires and sensory memories of past lives, experienced in the dreams before we fall asleep (hypnagogia), and through which artistic vision occurs. The Anima Mundi is likewise an intersecting place of memory and imagination but on the collective level; it is the “dream consciousness of the world” in which all memories and imagination are recorded for all time, including the spirits of the dead and heroes of myth, whose image “remains in the dream consciousness so long as the dreams of living men are with them.”
Dreaming Back the Dead, Dreaming Forward the Soul
The coexistence of memory, imagination, and the dead in dreams leads us directly to Yeats’s primary use of oneriomancy: to summon spirits to bring him metaphors for poetry. Concretizing the age old metaphorical connection between sleep and death, for Yeats, in dreams the living enter into the same state as ghosts, and ghosts enter into and act out their experiences in the dreams of the living. This state of oneiric possession is a core feature of Yeats’s vision of the afterlife. In what he called the Dreaming Back, the spirits of the dead re-dream the most passionate moments of their lives over and over, until they have expiated their emotional attachments by living through all of the consequences of the event, after which the soul is freed from the ego and can move on, or, unable to let go, is reborn. But because the dead are in the process of shedding their physical and emotional bodies, they must find “the names and words of the drama” in the dreams of the living, through the imaginal medium of the phantasmagoria. Our dreaming of other people’s past lives is another reason that dream images are often confusing. But when we dream intentionally, as evoked spiritual visions, then we can communicate with spirits in a more advanced stage of their after-life who can tell us truths from the Anima Mundi.
These interrelationships also allow for oneirically-inspired art to serve a greater spiritual purpose: “subjective art prepares life after death… Because it is closer to the correspondential dream.” According to Yeats’s spirit interlocutors, dream images show the state of our souls because they are an equal mixture of the impermanent, present life experience of the soul and the permanent state of the soul that exists between lives and in the Anima Mundi. The personal part of our dreams, the phantasy from the self, clothes an image of fundamental meaning, a necessary and universal symbol that is chosen from the Anima Mundi for the development of our soul. During the Dreaming Back of the afterlife, the Celestial Body or permanent part of the soul re-dreams its life in correspondence to these symbols. As such, by learning these symbols through dreams while alive and working out their emotional attachments through the phantasmagoria of art, we essentially quicken the afterlife process of having to relive our most intense and challenging experiences.
Sources:
- Mann, Neil. “W. B. Yeats, Dream, Vision, and the Dead.” Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult. Edited by Matthew Gibson and Neil Mann, Clemson University Press, 2016, pp. 107-170
- Yeats, W. B. “Per Amica Silentia Lunae.” Mythologies. The Macmillan Press, 1959
- Yeats, W. B. A Critical Edition of Yeats’s A Vision (1925). Edited by George Mills Harper and Walter Kelly Hood, The Macmillan Press, 1978
- Yeats, W. B. A Vision: A Reissue with the Author’s Final Revisions. Collier Books, 1965
- Yeats, W. B. Yeats’s Vision Papers: Volume 1: The Automatic Script: 5 November 1917—18 June 1918. Edited by George Mills Harper, et. al, Macmillan, 1992
- Yeats, W. B. Yeats’s Vision Papers: Volume 2: The Automatic Script: 25 June 1918—9 March 1920. Edited by George Mills Harper, et. al, Macmillan, 1992
- Yeats, W. B. Yeats’s Vision Papers: Volume 3: Sleep and Dream Notebooks, Vision Notebooks 1 and 2, Card File. Edited by George Mills Harper, Macmillan, 1992
- Yeats, W. B. “The Trembling of the Veil.” The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats Volume III: Autobiographies. Edited by William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, Scribner, 1999
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