DREAM GALAXY

Diary & poem of record · Transformation

A book read during sleep

Atcham, England · March 5, 1885

The following was read by me during sleep, in an old book printed in archaic type. As with many other things similarly read by me, I do not know whether it is to be found in any book:-- "After Buddha had been ten years in retirement, certain sages sent their disciples to him, asking him,--'What dost thou claim to be, Gotama?' "Buddha answered them, 'I claim to be nothing.'"

Original text — Dreams and Dream-Stories, Part I: Dreams, Anna Bonus Kingsford; edited by Edward Maitland

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Source
Dreams and Dream-Stories, Part I: Dreams — Anna Bonus Kingsford; edited by Edward Maitland, posthumous edition; dreams recorded c. 1876–1887. Part I, XXII. An Eastern Apologue
Rights
Public domain (author died 100+ years ago)
Record type
Diary & poem of record
Place
Atcham, England · British
Date
March 5, 1885
Uncertainty
Low — Kingsford explicitly describes this as text read during sleep. It is retained as a diary dream-reading experience, not as an independently sourced Buddhist text.
Imagery
Book · Writing · Time · A stranger
Feelings
Wonder

Another way to look at this dream

Notes on the images in this dream from psychology, myth, folklore and semiotics. Each names its source.

Book

Could you read the book? Did it belong to you, or did someone hand it over?

Hebrew prophets Myth & scripture

In a vision Ezekiel is handed a scroll written inside and out with “lamentations, and mourning, and woe”, told to eat it, and finds it “as honey for sweetness”. Taking a text into the body is how the message is received. (A vision, not a dream.)

Ezekiel 2:9–3:3 (King James Version)

Christian scripture Myth & scripture

In Revelation John is told to take a little book from an angel’s hand and eat it: sweet as honey in the mouth, bitter in the belly. The same book is both. (A vision, not a dream.)

Revelation 10:9–10 (King James Version)

All perspectives on book →

Writing

Were you reading the words or writing them? Do you remember anything you could use when you woke?

English Romantic poetry Literature

Coleridge said he fell asleep over a book and, for about three hours, composed two or three hundred lines of “Kubla Khan”, with the images rising “as things”. When he woke and began writing, a person on business from Porlock interrupted him for an hour, and most of the poem was gone.

S. T. Coleridge, preface to “Kubla Khan” (1816)

Victorian fiction Literature

Stevenson wrote that after two days of racking his brains for a plot, on the second night he “dreamed the scene at the window” of Jekyll and Hyde, and the scene where Hyde takes the powder and changes. The rest, he said, he made awake.

R. L. Stevenson, “A Chapter on Dreams”, in Across the Plains (1892)

All perspectives on writing →

Time

Did time in the dream run fast, slow, or stop? Were you late for something, or waiting?

Early dream research Dream research

Ellis devoted part of a chapter to the “apparent rapidity” of dreams and the odd sense of time in them, arguing that a dream often feels long because it is remembered like a described picture.

Havelock Ellis, The World of Dreams (1911), ch. IX

Nineteenth-century case Dream research

Alfred Maury reported dreaming a long drama of the French Revolution ending at the guillotine, and waking as the bed’s headboard fell on his neck. Freud and others debated how so much could fit into a moment.

Alfred Maury, Le Sommeil et les rêves (1861); discussed in Freud (1900), ch. I

All perspectives on time →

Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.

Dreams that share its images