DREAM GALAXY

Literary dream · Light & dark

The purple spirit of nightshade

Dream cathedral imagery · Date unknown · literary dream-story

It seemed to my sleeping fancy that I stood in a deep, serene light of shadowy purple, grave and sombre,--a light which suggested to me the sound of low minor chords, the last notes of some organ voluntary, dying beneath a master's touch, and rolling down the hazy aisles of an empty cathedral, out into the gloomy night, and upward to the stars. A spirit floated in the air before me,--a phantom draped in heavy sweeping robes of dense purple, but with eyes of such vivid and fiery brightness, that I could not look upon them; and my heart quailed in my bosom with a strange oppressive sense of fear and wonder.

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

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Source
Dreams and Dream-Stories, Part II: Dream-Stories — Anna Bonus Kingsford; edited by Edward Maitland, posthumous edition (1908 Project Gutenberg source edition). Part II, VII. The Nightshade
Rights
Public domain (author died 100+ years ago)
Record type
Literary dream
Place
Dream cathedral imagery · British
Date
Date unknown · literary dream-story
Uncertainty
Low — Literary dream-story from Part II, explicitly framed as a sleeping fancy; not classified as diary testimony. Its composition date is unknown.
Imagery
Light · Darkness · Music · Temple · Stars
Feelings
Fear · Wonder · Awe

Another way to look at this dream

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

Light

Where did the light come from? What did it let you see — and was anything too bright to look at?

Jung · Lumen naturae

Writing on Paracelsus, Jung took up the old idea of a lumen naturae, a “light of nature” within us that illuminates from the inside rather than from outside authority.

C. G. Jung, “Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon”, Collected Works 13

Early dream research Dream research

Ellis noted the common claim that light on closed eyes sets off dreams, but said he had no decisive evidence and that eyelids guard sleep well. His own dream of a bright light and a huge shadow came after an evening walk into the setting sun.

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

Hebrew Bible Myth & scripture

The first thing spoken in Genesis is “Let there be light”: light marks the start of an ordered world.

Genesis 1:3

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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

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Music

Did you know the tune, or was it new? Where was it coming from?

Shakespeare Literature

Caliban tells of the island’s “sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not”, and of dreaming that the clouds opened to show riches, “that, when I wak’d, I cried to dream again”. The music is what he cannot keep.

Shakespeare, The Tempest III.2

Greek philosophy Philosophy

Socrates’ recurring dream said “Cultivate and make music”. Wondering whether it meant music in the ordinary sense, he composed a hymn to Apollo and turned some of Aesop’s fables into verse.

Plato, Phaedo 60c–61b (Jowett trans.)

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

Dreams that share its images