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Phantasmagoria
Part 2

She awoke that morning from a dream, fresh with that free and wondrous feeling which lies at the heart of life’s exhilaration and glory; but, soon the returning waves of stifling reality swept over her like a sickness, smothering her in the dread of another hopeless day amidst the ruins of anxiety and depression.

She dragged herself out of bed. She was like a doomed ship, drifting in the storm’s aftermath under a moon pale and wan, her sails tattered and torn before the relentless wind of existence.

The dream had seemed so real, but it, too, had wilted in the heat like a flower that had lost its precious gleam of morning dew. But the hull must drive on, musn’t it, she thought, though the mast be broken…No! No more! Tonight I will end it all Tonight I will end my life! She spent the whole day planning it.

Yes, she would scuttle her ship—her car—and sink within it to the bottom of the sea, a river, really, and drown, with a sigh and a groan, devoured by forces too large to fight against.

So, she drove her car towards the cliff near the bridge. She drove faster and faster. The waters called to her—their cool and refreshing depths invited her in. “Come to me,” some deathly voice whispered in her ear, “Come to me and find everlasting peace. Come and sleep with me in the endless night. Let me cover you with my ebon wings, in darkness, for it is eternal and complete.”

“No, no, not thee!” she cried aloud. “I cannot go with thee, not with evil!”

She drove her car up to the edge of the cliff, having stopped just short. Her mind was now drinking in and savoring the blue and green world that was reflected in the river. This sort of sparkling day was not the kind of day on which she could end it all. As she looked deeper and deeper into the water she began to drift into a dream-world of her own making—a fantasy fairy world in which her ideals could live on, untainted by the reality of this mediocre world. A voice called to her. Visions of Camelot danced in her head. Mythical fantasy worlds and legends beckoned to her seemingly from all directions. An inner voice called to her, the sweet voice of someone who she could love.

She had often retreated to this storybook world, but now she would take it a bit further: she would plunge into it, live within its splendor, and live mostly therein—before all else. Yes, this dreamland would be her final refuge. The fairyland called to her daily; it would be the realization of all of the imagined perfections that she had always brought to mind when the real world had so often failed to meet her expectations.

She freed her mind from many of its real life shackles and began to dream more freely, though still awake. “I’ll breath life into you, my little voice,” she said to herself, as the noise of her consciousness slowly faded away. Her imaginary world came into focus. She could now paint it with the colors of her dreams, creating a life closer to the heart’s desire. She felt like a Goddess, being able to create life at will in her dreams. This is when she created him. This is when she brought him to life by giving him her own essence. However, his existence was his own to have, and so he knew nothing of her as his creator but only that he was alive in a beautiful and perfect world. She had built him in her soul’s own image; she had molded him from her heart’s wishes. She fell in love with him, for she could do no other.

“Come into my dreams,” she would say to conjure him up; “Come into my dreams, and then by day I shall be well again”, for she was using lines from the romantic poets she had read.

He was a good and decent human being, for how could he be otherwise with her ideals brought to life in him. He gave fully of himself in life and love, always placing his partner’s happiness and fulfillment above his own. Their relationship was driven by love alone, and they celebrated it often in her dreams. Yes, she had, at last, found the love that the real world had so often denied her, for she had created a new, better reality.

Yes, he did feel sadness at times, too, for she could not totally submerge that part of herself, but it was subdued in him and so the sadness was only used as necessary to enhance the beauty of their love via its sheer contrast and brightness. She, too, gave all that she had to him, watching over him and loving him deeply, utterly, and completely.

Nothing could hurt him in this special world. He was impervious to pain, cold, fire, and sickness. Once he was fatally shot in a war, but he didn’t die because it was from her spirit that he drew his life principle, and of course she had willed him to live on. Another time, he was hit by lightening, but as we have seen, a dream can never die, and so it was that he arose alive and well from the smoldering embers. He never got sick and seldom had a headache. “Everyone should have the best in life,” she said to herself, “and in my world there can be no suffering.”

Each night he would come, saying, “I arise from dreams of thee.”

“Kiss me, my dearest phantasm,” she whispered, “and hold me ever dear; shelter me from the evils and the melancholy of the torturous world; show me the true meaning of love that the real world has forgotten! Come into my dreams, and then by day I shall be well again.”

Knowing not that he was her dream image, he never doubted his own existence and happiness; however, when she didn’t think of him or when she slept, he disappeared temporarily until she awoke or thought of him again. So, when she slept or daydreamed, he existed, and when she was awake and not daydreaming, then he slipped into that oblivion which he knew only as sleep and quiet slumber, Death’s kinder brother. He was the day to her night. He arose from her dreams of him—much like the mountain rises from the depths of the valley. Without her, he could not be; without him, she could not be. The circle was now complete, the link was closed—they had become two locked boxes, each of which contained the other’s key.

The fact that he only existed as a dream in her mind took nothing away from their relationship, for their love was true and the feelings were felt as deeply as they would normally have been felt in the real world—as anyone who has dreamt can readily attest to, for, ultimately, it is what we feel that matters, not the source that causes the feeling—for all feeling comes from within.

He did wonder, sometimes, about just how good and lucky his life was, about his having almost super powers at times; but, he concluded only that he led a charmed life which stemmed from an inner happiness that constantly poured forth visions in positive creative images that bred good fortunes. Indeed he did, for she had given him that power—a power that had come from somewhere within her. He was her twin, yet also her opposite, for somehow she had given him an enthusiasm for life which she didn’t seem to have herself. He was a reflection of her image in which his outward vision mirrored her inward hope.

Consequently, he blossomed with creativity in art, music, and writing, as she continued to maintain him as both his protector and his inspiration, although, as we have seen, he certainly did have free will, for he knew not the source of his creation nor of the tendencies placed into him.

They lived and loved together, allied and alloyed in a soft metallic night, blending into the golden oneness that love had always promised but had never before delivered. He was born with the inclination of goodness—so she never had to possess him or demand from him.

Life blossomed now, and some of this exuberance did indeed surface and show itself back in the real world, but in the end she still found her real life to be the cold harsh reality that it had always been. So, she called him back to her dreams, again and again. Here they were free to love and live fully, their chemistry sending out invitations of love which were soft, sweet, and smiling on the rising air, a spray of liquid love, mystified, filling the scene with a vaporous perfume of well-being everywhere: they were up, warm, and floating on the clouds of dreams. Their passions smoldered like incense, and burned like the candle’s flame; they consumed each other often, yet continued to have endless love to give, their passions always seeming to reach new levels, then expanding even more, building, ever building.

Now and then, of course, she had to attend to events back in the real world, but it really wasn’t so bad there anymore because she knew that she had something good to look forward to in her dreams. So, she went happily through the motions in the real world, feeling better and better as the days went by, but always looking forward to the chance to dream him up again, when she would say softly to herself:

Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again!
For so the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day.

Come, as thou cam’st a thousand times,
A messenger from radiant climes,
And smile on thy new world, and be
As kind to others as to me!

Or, as thou never cam’st in sooth,
Come now, and let me dream it truth,
And part my hair, and kiss my brow,
And say, ‘My love! Why sufferest thou?’

Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again!
For so the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day.
(—Matthew Arnold)

She again faded off into dreamland… And there he was. Just the sight of him would bring the world to a stop, for she could only concentrate on him. When she looked at him, the birds’ song fainted on the moving air, the night breezes stopped their motion, and the moon’s radiance shone no more—for her heart had welled up within and had merged with his own. She felt herself being drawn into the dream of love in which there was only one overwhelming and all consuming feeling of glory and peace and unity.

But then, during one rainy night back in her real world, when she was driving in a storm along the cliff road around a curve, where she had once contemplated suicide, her car skidded and flew off the side of the water slicked road, falling three thousand feet, and crashed hard and straight into the rocks below and exploded in a fiery wreck.

The flames licked at her for hours, but she felt no heat. All her bones should have been crushed in the fall, but they weren’t. She did not even bleed. There was no pain. She arose from the car’s wreck unharmed, and walked away. It was then that she realized that she, too, was a character in someone’s dream…

… She did not even bleed. There was no pain. She arose from the car’s wreck unharmed, and walked away. It was then that she realized that she too was a figment of someone else’s imagination.

“Who dreamest me?” she cried to the sky. “Reveal thyself! Who art thou? Who art thou that won’t even let me die!”

The heavens remained dumb, so she climbed back up towards the road.

Back at the top she again cried, “Who hast made me? Who?—Thy image is tainted!”

Visions of angels appeared in the sky. “You have a question for us?” they asked.

“Yes, what sort of God made me to suffer and toil in this sad world?”

“It’s a lovely and beautiful world,” said the angels in a chorus.

“OK,” she said, “I’ll play your game. Tell me now, who made this varied and sensual world of charm and grace and color? Who gave me intellectual beauty and those rare but beautiful waves of emotions which I have known and enjoyed for their breathtaking meaning and depth?”

“A good and loving spirit,” they said. “That’s our usual answer.”

“And who gave me freedom to love and live and grow, flowering free and fragile, though beautiful, but then withering, faded and forlorn in old age, like some evanescent dream?”

“It was the Creator of all life.”

“And who gave me sadness?”

“HE did,” they answered.

“And who gave the world hunger, pain, misfortune, sickness, death, worry, and unbearable calamity which drags us suffering to the grave?”

“He reigns,” they said.

“Give me his name!” she asked. “Who is he that does not even grant me peace in the grave?—for Hell awaits me there as a further torture, does it not.”

“He rules,” the angels replied.

“His name! I ask but his name—the name of one so cruel! Who is the one that would create man as a precious vessel, though imperfect, and then destroy this lovely creation by sickness and death in rage?”

“He is the One,” they said.

“Name him and let him be known for his vengeful name—for in my own fine dreams of a man I allowed no sickness, no pain—all was love and beauty! Who is he that is the source of my everlasting pain?”

“HE does not exist,” the angels finally said, “nor does the Devil, nor do we—all simply is as it is and so it ever shall be. It’s the way that the world happens to work. Therefore, all is right with the world. We angels are simply manifestations of your own thoughts. All that is truly real comes from within; nothing comes from without.”

“There is no creative deity?” she asked.

“There is none; there is only an unconscious spirit which is part and parcel with the universe, co-eternal with it and embodied in it as the principle of life in all things. It is the connectedness of all things, and exists far below the level of atoms.”

She didn’t know whether she was relieved or angry at not having anyone to blame for the state of the world.

“But whose dream am I,” she wondered aloud. “Who saved me from death?”

Another voice replied—the familiar voice of the man of her dreams. “It is I who made thee, my beloved,” he said. “I dreamt of thee. You are the dream of my dreams—you are my ideal, for your love is so innocent and free!”

“No,” she said, “it cannot be, for it was I who made thee in my dreams.”

“Yes,” he said, “but my image was already in you, was it not? Who put it there? It was from that image that you gave birth to mine—but the real story is more like we have somehow made each other. I may be the day to your night, but you are the same to me when I dream of you. I am your opposite twin. Each of us cannot exist without the other.”

“I believe it,” she said, “although there seems to be no initial cause. Very strange though.”

“I see and dream of you, my dream woman, each night,” he whispered.

“We are indeed two souls, each of which opens the other,” she said.

“Yes, it is I who made you as you made me, from all that was already inside us. As your twin spirit I arose, given life only by your dreams. Oh please, let me live, for now I sustain you—I protect you and love you as you do the same for me. Now that I love you and want you, I need you.”

“If one of us dies,” she said, “then the other will perish also?”

“The valley cannot exist without the mountain. There can be no day without the night; there can be no beauty without sadness.”

“We are twin-opposites—as alike as dawn and dusk in our aspects; reflections, as it were of each other’s image—visions which truly exist in the mind, for all is real in the mind.”

“Day gives birth to night and then night gives birth to day. That is us and that is the cycle which created us, within which scheme it was not necessary for either part to come first, as with the chicken and the egg.”

“But we live neither here nor there. Does it matter? Now that we know that we’re just dream images how can we really live and love?”

“We can neither fully live nor completely die where we are.”

“What is deathless is also lifeless, although it is still a beautiful work of art, such as the ideals that we see in a painting.”

“I can be as real as you wish me to be, as can you to me.”

“Some say it’s crazy to try and live a dream.”

“Some say it’s crazy not to!”

“Join my real world,” she said, “and I will join yours as well.”

“But your day is my night and vice versa. How can we meet?”

“We’ll meet at twilight dawn or dusk—the only time that night and day can touch.”

“I shall come,” he said, “leaving his dreamland forever and joining hers as her real life love.

She greeted the man of her ideals, saying to him, “I have wished you into being. My thoughts of you have colored my actions and have led me to find you in the real world—it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, an example of positive creative imagery.”

“It was indeed,” he answered. “Although here I shall at last know true sadness and death. But, also, I will experience higher levels of beauty.”

She said, no longer anxious or depressed, “When you’re open to beauty, then you become vulnerable to sadness. What I have finally learned, the hard way, is that they are inseparable in life.”

“Some people lead lives in which they are fat, dumb, and almost content.”

“Yes, they don’t live much, but then again, they don’t suffer much either. They’re immune to both beauty and sadness.”

“It’s like when you’re not with me. There is pain when I miss you, but for me, if I had no one to miss, then the pain would be greater.”

The new light of morning shone in that blessed mood that attends to the quiet intermingling of day and night in the dawn’s misty twilight. She came to him during morning twilight; he came to her at evening twilight. In between they dreamt of each other.

Each day forward was born in quiet innocence as their human hearts tenderly touched—open, vulnerable, and exposed, yet fully alive and beating. Days turned into weeks as they grew close together in the soft glow that was neither night nor day, but was somewhere in the nether world of half-light dawn or dusk. The morning brimmed with the freshness of life, its beauty spreading far and wide into every root and tendril. Life took wing from their these cocoons—an ugly caterpillar having magically transformed into a beautiful butterfly. Weeks turned into months. It was a dream within a dream within a dream. Faint images from dim shadows flickered and grew brighter. High noon came and showered its brightness into life’s every chamber. Now that they had felt the glory of reality, they would seek it always. From the months a life was made. Life was a dream. The afternoon sparkled and spread its gold to every living thing. Years of contentment rolled by.

The soft light of evening shone again, in that sacred mood that attends the quiet intermingling of day and night in the twilight of dusk. He came, as usual, saying:

I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright.

I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
Has led me—who knows how?—
To thy chamber window sweet!

The wandering airs they faint
On the dark, the silent stream,—
The champak odours fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream,

The nightingale’s complaint,
It dies upon her heart,
As I must die on thine,
O, beloved as thou art!

O, lift me from the grass!
I die, I faint, I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.

My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats out loud and fast
Oh! press it close to thine again,
Where it will break at last!
(—Shelley)

He awoke that morning from a dream, filled with dread, dripping with sweat, wondering whether he had gone to Heaven or to Hell, and not knowing if he was truly awake or still in the midst of a nightmare; but, soon a calming wave of peace and quiet swept over him as he turned and saw that his dream lady was lying there next to him.

“I’m alive?”

“You were sick,” she said, “something you’re not very used to in my world, but you are recovering now. I suppose it’s a sign of age, for we’ve spent many years together now.”

“We’re getting old, aren’t we,” he continued.

“Indeed, but we still have many good years left. Here, I’ll read you something from Wordsworth that he wrote in his later years:”

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind.
(—Wordsworth)

A shade passed from between them—a door between their worlds had opened to let their dreams pass through. One shooting star after another signaled these wishful events.

They awoke that morning from another dream—or perhaps they dreamt that they awoke—on the shore where they had once discovered the Spirit of the Earth. They rubbed the sand from their eyes and opened their minds to the day, being careful not to clear from them the shadows of dreamy visions. Their night-time apparitions were soothing, calming, relaxing, real, tranquil, refreshing, restful, and peaceful—just like the water of the lake which still slept under the morning mist.

They had camped on the shore, in a mossy nook between some rocks. An overhang of trees protected them. They couldn’t see the sky, but they could see a reflection of the sky and its clouds in the water when the mist lifted. A reflected bird flew in a reflected sky. Water lilies floated in the heavenly mirror. Orange day-lilies nearby told them that that deep Summer was here. Haunting visions poured forth as they looked at the image of the sky in the water. Soft winds rippled the water ever so slightly and blew the branches of the reflected trees. Dreamy visions held them still a little bit sleep-eyed. Again their worlds had met at twilight. A lark rose from the water and flew into nothingness. Gossamer threads ran from rock to rock, seemingly attaching them to their dream world. Was it dawn or dusk? In half light, it did not matter.

“Which is real and which is an illusion?” she wondered.

“Do we sleep or do we dream?” he asked.

She answered with a poem:

Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep, —that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live —
(—Shelley)

Blossoms started falling from the trees and began to cover their feet. When a cushion had been formed, they sat down to prepare an imaginative breakfast of nuts and strawberries. Flowers gently cascaded onto them as their dreams took wing. They did eight impossible things like this before breakfast each and every day.

A unicorn wandered by, its existence fed only by the possibility of being. A chimera came forth and ate nuts and berries from their hands. Faeries danced between the flowers, caught only by a believing glance. Elves rode flying horses, and centaurs walked proudly down the path near them. These were the creatures who never were, all living in the land that never was.

They looked into each other’s eyes, reflecting on their thoughts.

“I’m not sure what world we’re in anymore,” she noted. “Nor does it matter very much which side of the looking glass we’re on, for we are here.”

“It’s as if some ethereal beauty has descended over our thoughts, and lent a poetic vision to us,” he added, “a shadow of some divine perfection It is rapt, although a little vague, but I can sense its presence. Hear:”

—I look on high;
Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled
The veil of life and death? or do I lie
In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep
Spread far around and inaccessibly its circles?
(—Shelley)

The day soon came to life, and they saw castle builders laying stones, dream merchants giving away various unrealities, idealists realizing their ambitions, visionaries watching plans taking shape, ghosts and wraiths playing joyfully on the air, vapors forming and rising and then coalescing into forms, phantoms riding on the light hearted breezes, will-o’-the-wisps sparkling over the water, and mirages becoming real at the slightest touch.

“I am so much enjoying our world,” she said.

“Here, all things are possible—it is an oasis untouched by oblivion and regret, free from contagion, debt, worry, care, strife, and woe.”

And so they lived in the clouds, drifted into the Land of Nod, resided in never-land, and made a home in the world of make believe. Twilight fell and brooded awhile at the shore. They looked at the water and saw therein a reflection of the sunset. Reflected fire burned through reflected clouds. A fish swam in the reflected sky.

She walked to the water’s edge and looked into it, expecting to see her reflection there, but she was surprised and pleased to see there his there instead.

“Come,” she said, “look! Come here to the shore.”

He walked down to the water and looked in, seeing not his own reflection, but a reflection of her instead.

“We have merged,” he said, “we are one. We will be strong now. We will survive in either world.”