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Foreword. Xanadu: Dreams of the Dark Side of Paradise
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Foreword Xanadu: Dreams of the Dark Side of Paradise anthony f. c. wallace Some years ago, when I was a freshman at Lebanon Valley College, I took the required introductory course in English literature. The professor, who happened to be my father, required the class to memorize what he called ‘‘neck verses,’’ brief passages from important writers, that hopefully would help us to remember some of the common literary heritage, and also would serve as badges of identity, rather like military dog tags, identifying us as members of the educated (i.e., English-educated) community. Some lines from S. T. Coleridge’s ‘‘Kubla Khan’’ have stayed with me: In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. . . . . . . . . A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Inspired by her ‘‘symphony and song,’’ he would build that pleasure dome, but would terrify those who saw him, a demon with viii Foreword . . . flashing eyes, [and] floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise. ‘‘Kubla Khan,’’ one of the gems of English literature, belongs in a volume exploring the importance of dreaming in the early modern Atlantic world. The verses were composed in a dream. According to his own account, after taking an ‘‘anodyne’’ (he was addicted to laudanum), Coleridge awoke remembering a poem he had composed in his sleep. He began to write it down but was interrupted by a visitor, and by the time he returned to his desk, he had forgotten the rest of the two hundred or so remaining lines. The classic study of the sources of the language and images in Coleridge’s poem is The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, by John Livingston Lowes, a collation of the writings, mostly travel literature, from memories of which Coleridge had selected the elements of composition. Lowes’s 650-page mountain of literary criticism itself has been repeatedly reprinted, as recently as 2008. As Lowes properly points out, the ‘‘magical synthesis’’ was ‘‘joiner’s work.’’ Coleridge’s dream was evidently the product of work, the putting together of items from a jumble of disparate elements into a construction that satisfied him as a writer. Anecdotal accounts of intellectual and scienti fic discoveries made in dreams also point to the dream as real mental work trying to solve a problem preoccupying the dreamer. And the essays in this anthology reveal dreamwork as the source of religious and social innovation. I would speculate generally that the dream is mental work in which the brain sifts through mountains of mnemonic debris, searching for the solution to a pressing personal or professional problem that has proved to be insoluble by conscious effort. Some dreams remain garbage, but a few constructions have promise, and if they deal meaningfully with issues important to the dreamer and to a larger community, they are taken seriously (whether or not they are acceptable). Seen in this perspective, the dream is a random search for an alternative survival strategy when standard plans have failed and thus can be seen as an adaptive evolutionary device, biologically wired into the brain, like the capacity for mutation in the genome. But Lowes avoids giving psychoanalytic or other interpretations E (2024-03-19 04:20 GMT) Foreword ix of the meaning and function of the dreams that he examines. We shall approach those issues later when we return to Coleridge and his world. To give a personal example of a dream as an effort to solve real problems, I will cite the dream told me by a friend, an American Indian herbalist (‘‘medicine man’’), who was widely respected by both White and Indian clients. In his youth he had a dream in which a woman dressed in white stood before him, holding a basket, covered with a white cloth. She said the basket contained a plant that would provide a sure cure for tuberculosis. But she only showed him the roots; the leaves remained concealed. When he and I were out driving he would now and then say ‘‘stop!’’ and jump out of the car, to run into a field to uproot a plant. But it never was the right one. The chapters...