DREAM GALAXY

Diary & poem of record · Cities & buildings

The pencil writing by itself

Inn, location unstated · 5 November 1885

I seemed in my vision to be on a long and wearisome journey, and to have arrived at an Inn, in which I was offered shelter and rest. The apartment given me consisted of a bedroom and parlour, communicating, and furnished in an antique manner, everything in the rooms appearing to be worm-eaten, dusty and out of date. The walls were bare and dingy; there was not a picture or an ornament in the apartment. An extremely dim light prevailed in the scene … But, presently, I became aware of strange things going on about me. On a table in a corner lay some papers and a pencil. With a feeling of indescribable horror I saw this pencil assume an erect position and begin of itself to write on the paper

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, XXI. The Haunted Inn
Rights
Public domain (author died 100+ years ago)
Record type
Diary & poem of record
Place
Inn, location unstated · British
Date
5 November 1885
Uncertainty
Low — Dated first-person diary vision. The quoted scene is one coherent excerpt from the single inn dream.
Imagery
House · Writing · Darkness · Light
Feelings
Horror · Unease

Another way to look at this dream

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

House

Whose house was it — one you know, or one you only know in the dream? Which room did you spend the most time in?

Jung · The house as psyche

In 1909 Jung dreamed of a house whose cellar led down into older and older layers — Roman, then prehistoric. He later took it as an image of the psyche, with the oldest layers at the bottom.

C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)

Phenomenology Philosophy

Gaston Bachelard argued that the house “shelters daydreaming”: the attic and cellar of a childhood home stay with us as places to imagine from.

Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958)

Chinese fiction Literature

In chapter 5 of Dream of the Red Chamber, Baoyu dreams his way into the Land of Illusion, a palace of cabinets holding registers of the household’s fates.

Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber, ch. 5

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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)

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Darkness

What could you not see in the dark — and did it feel like something could see you?

Jung · Nigredo

Jung borrowed the alchemists’ word nigredo, “blackening”, for the dark first stage of a transformation — a time of confusion that comes before anything clarifies.

C. G. Jung, “Psychology and Alchemy”, Collected Works 12

Greek myth Myth & scripture

In Hesiod’s family tree of the gods, Night (Nyx) is the mother of Sleep (Hypnos) and of the tribe of Dreams. Darkness here is where dreams come from.

Hesiod, Theogony 211–212

All perspectives on darkness →

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

Dreams that share its images