Literary dream · Cities & buildings
A winter journey toward the Alps
England to continental Europe · Date unknown · literary dream-story
A day or two before Christmas, a few years since, I found myself compelled by business to leave England for the Continent. I am an American, junior partner in a London mercantile house having a large Swiss connection; and a transaction--needless to specify her--required immediate and personal supervision abroad, at a season of the year when I would gladly have kept festival in London with my friends. But my journey was destined to bring me an adventure of a very remarkable character, which made me full amends for the loss of Christmas cheer at home. I crossed the Channel at night from Dover to Calais. The passage was bleak and snowy, and the passengers were very few.
Open this dream in the galaxy →
- 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, I. A Village of Seers
- Record type
- Literary dream
- Place
- England to continental Europe · British
- Date
- Date unknown · literary dream-story
- Uncertainty
- Low — Literary story from Part II, clearly classified as literature rather than a first-person diary dream. Its composition date is not asserted.
- Imagery
- Train · Snow & ice · Road · Friend
- Feelings
- Wonder · Loneliness
Another way to look at this dream
Notes on the images in this dream from psychology, myth, folklore and semiotics. Each names its source.
Road
Were you heading towards somewhere or leaving somewhere? Did you choose this road?
Jung · Individuation as a way
Jung often spoke of individuation as a path one has to walk oneself; no one else’s map fits exactly.
C. G. Jung, “Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation”, Collected Works 9i
Upanishads Classical text
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad says that in dream “there are no chariots, no harnesses, no roads — but he creates chariots, harnesses and roads”: the dreamer builds the way as they go.
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.3.10
Tang tale Literature
In “The World Inside a Pillow”, a young man on the road to Handan lives a whole career in a dream while millet cooks — the source of the idiom “yellow millet dream”.
Shen Jiji, “The World Inside a Pillow” (c. 780)
Snow & ice
Was the snow fresh or old? Did it make a sound underfoot? Did the cold hurt, or wake you up?
Early dream research Dream research
Ellis gives cold from disturbed bed covers as a common bodily source of dreams, with the case of a sleeper who dreamed of being surrounded by snow on a mountain and woke tangled in the sheets, partly uncovered, on a cold night.
Havelock Ellis, The World of Dreams (1911), ch. IV, on tactile sensations
Chinese poetry Literature
Liu Zongyuan’s “River Snow” empties a whole landscape — no birds, no footprints — and leaves one old man fishing in the cold: snow as solitude.
Liu Zongyuan, “River Snow”
Friend
How long since you last saw this friend? What were you doing together in the dream — something you used to do?
Dream research Dream research
The “continuity” view in dream research finds that most dream characters are people we know, and that dreams tend to carry on our waking relationships and concerns.
G. William Domhoff, The Scientific Study of Dreams (2003)
Tang poetry Literature
Du Fu, not knowing whether his exiled friend Li Bai is alive, writes that “my old friend entered my dream, knowing how long I have thought of him”.
Du Fu, “Dreaming of Li Bai” (759)
Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.
Dreams that share its images
- Christmas at a house by the Welsh border North Wales border · Date unknown · literary dream-story
- Snow fell so no one could track them Great Lakes region · traditional (recorded c. 1820s–1850s)
- A voice diagnosed the young artist Rome · 21 February 1880
- Endless platforms on the way to Berlin England · before 1911
- My own vast shadow England (countryside) · before 1911
- I could make the summer Zurich, Switzerland · c. 1910