Michael Grosso: Mark Twain And The World of Dreams

Mark Twain And The World of Dreams 

The dream is the greatest of all psychic phenomena, for like a god the dreamer is a creator of worlds.  But what are dreams?  Shadows of our waking life, airy nothings? Perhaps not, say some who don’t mind subverting conventional wisdom. According to philosophers C.D. Broad and H.H. Price, our waking minds are immersed in an extended dream world, which continues with its business, even as we carry on in waking reality.

Moreover, there’s a flimsy partition between waking and dream reality.  Dozing off at your desk or on a train ride can plunge you into another world, incongruous and unexpected.  Ingest a magic mushroom or smoke some weed, and a pile of garbage may become an enchanting landscape.  Nearly die and you may find yourself whirling out of your body into a strange light and meeting your dead granny and uncle Harry.    

What if that other world and its many mansions were interfused with our ordinary physical 3-D space?  It would be easy to imagine all sorts of leakages from dream space into our tremulous waking life. Some people might have a knack for crossing the enchanted boundary and thus gain a sense for what lies behind the veil of waking awareness.

Mark Twain, for example, who wrote about his psychic experiences, was a  dream aficionado.  At age sixty-three, he wrote My Platonic Sweetheart, an account of a dream adventure lasting forty-four years.  This consisted of having episodic encounters with an archetypal fifteen-year-old sweetheart, sometimes called Agnes.  In the dream, Twain is always seventeen.  They meet about once every two years in various exotic locales; her appearance may change but her instantly recognizable soul essence shines through.