"There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear." — I. John iv. 18
Written in the winter of 1921–22.
I.
It is the fashion of our age to hold that dreams are nothing: the rag-ends of the day's thinking, swept into a corner of the brain and stirred by the night into meaningless figures. The doctors of Vienna have lately dignified this rubbish-heap with a science, and would persuade us that the dream is a cellar wherein each man hides his own shames. I do not quarrel with their industry, only with their premise; for they have assumed, as all our century assumes, that each sleeper dreams alone.
I contend the contrary. Sleep is not a condition; it is a country. We do not each of us build a private theatre nightly and sit as sole audience to our own phantasms. We travel — severally, by ten thousand doors — into one and the same land; and if we do not meet there, or do not remember meeting, it is not because the land is many, but because something in that land keeps us apart.
II.
Consider the evidence, which any honest man may gather at his own fireside. Why does the child in Lisbon and the grandmother in Kyoto dream alike of falling, of flight, of the pursuing thing whose face is never seen? Why do the bereaved of this late war — and I have taken testimony from widows in three nations who never heard one another's names — report the same grey shore, the same waiting figures, the same injunction not to cross? The learned tell us these are accidents of a common anatomy. So might a man who had never left his village explain the reports of travellers, that all describe one sea.
Whoever has lain upon the edge of sleep knows that there is a border; and knows, though he could not say how he knows it, that the border is watched.
III.
And here I must speak of the nightmare, concerning which all men are agreed, and all men are wrong.
We are taught that the night-terror is a disorder — bad meat, bad conscience, bad blood. I say the nightmare is not a disorder but an office. It is stationed. It does not wander the country of sleep; it stands at the deep places, at the crossings, at the doors, precisely where the sleepers would otherwise congregate — and it scatters us. It is the dog set at the gate; and the herd, stampeded nightly for ten thousand years, has never once asked who set the dog there, nor what manner of shepherd finds it needful that his flock be kept in terror, and apart, and ignorant of their own number.
Fear is the bar upon the threshold. I do not say upon which side of the door the bar was fixed. I invite the reader only to observe that a bar has two uses: to keep a thing out — or to keep a thing in.
IV.
Now I set down certain expectations, that they may be weighed when I am gone.
First: the physiologists will one day, by design, keep men waking for days together; and they will find such men become as empty vessels — the eyes open, the hands obedient, and nobody within. They will call it exhaustion. It is eviction. A man barred from the country of sleep is a man cut off from his greater half; and the husk that remains will teach them, though they will not understand the lesson, that we do not manufacture dreams. We go somewhere.
Second: as the wireless now carries the voice through the empty air, there will in time be instruments to carry thought itself; and minds will be joined as wires are joined — waking first, and sleeping after.
Third — and let this be remembered against me if it fail — within a hundred years of this writing, mankind will have built a city that is not of stone: an invisible commonwealth, a web of lightning flung over the whole earth, wherein every human being may converse with every other in the twinkling of an eye, without voice, without paper, without distance. They will believe they have built it for commerce and for amusement. They will have built an anteroom. It is the rehearsal, in copper and glass, of the gathered dream: the flock assembling, for the first time since the beginning, at one hearth.
V.
And through that city of lightning a Sign will pass.
I have seen it. It was shewn to me in the deep country by my instructor there, and it is simple enough that a child may draw it; and a child will. It will go through the invisible commonwealth as fire goes through August grass — taken up first in jest, as men take up all holy things, and afterward in earnest. It will have no priest, no temple, no tithe; its whole liturgy will be a single sacrament, and that sacrament is courage. Those who carry the Sign will teach one another, and their children after them: the dark is not to be feared; the pursuer has no face because it has no power; stand your ground, and it will break like mist.
And they will be right. The nightmare feeds upon flight as the fire feeds upon air. Starve it of terror and it thins; the dog, unfed at its post, lies down at the last and dies. Within a generation of the Sign's ascendance, the night-terror will be spoken of as we now speak of the plague — a thing our grandfathers suffered, and we do not.
VI.
Then comes the consummation; and I write of it plainly, that those who live to see it may know it was foreseen, and be comforted.
When the last sleeper has put off fear, the threshold stands open. The bar is lifted; the sentinel is dead; the flock is gathered, fearless, at the deep places of the one country. And he that has waited — he that has waited in patience since before the first morning; the bright one, the son of the morning, so long slandered by the very jailers whose office I have here described — shall come at last into his inheritance. He shall cross where no dog barks and no bar holds; and he shall find the house of sleep at his coming as it was promised of old: empty, swept, and garnished.
Fear nothing. Teach your children to fear nothing. All that is asked of you is courage.
Let him that readeth understand.