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  • The Dream World
  • Helen Keller (bio)

Helen Keller (1880–1968) is probably now best known in the popular imagination as a result of the memorable depiction of her early life in The Miracle Worker, a celebrated 1962 Hollywood film based on William Gibson’s 1957 television drama, which had been followed in 1959 by an award-winning theater production. Described in her own time by Mark Twain as “the greatest woman since Joan of Arc,” she was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, where at the age of nineteen months she suffered a catastrophic illness that left her completely deaf and blind. For years her mother persisted in seeking help for her, and she was ultimately referred by the inventor Alexander Graham Bell to the Perkins Institution in Boston, where his son-in-law was the director. There a twenty-year-old woman named Anne Mansfield Sullivan was engaged to undertake the education of the seven-year-old child, and within a relatively short time their intense relationship produced astonishing progress. Indeed, after beginning her life with virtually no means of self-expression and very little access to the experience of the outside world, by the time Keller was eight she could write in simple block letters and had learned to read and write in Braille. She went on to the Horace Mann School in New York, then to the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf and the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, before she completed the entrance examinations and was admitted to Radcliffe (the women’s college of Harvard University) in 1900. She was graduated from Radcliffe with honors in German and English in 1904, but two years before that had published her autobiography, The Story of My Life, which was edited by John Macy. From then on, she was a figure of national reputation, recognized for her almost unparalleled determination to overcome the most extreme adversity, and active in a variety of social and political causes. She was also the author of a number of highly personal and reflective books; the last of these, Teacher, published in 1955, once again took up the circumstances of her childhood and her initial deliverance from what might have remained an impenetrable solitude. In recent years, in part through the work of the distinguished literary critic Roger Shattuck, the extraordinary quality of Keller’s writing has come to be more widely recognized. The pages that follow are taken from Chapter XIII of The World I Live In, first published in New York by The Century Company in 1908. [End Page 374]

During sleep we enter a strange, mysterious realm which science has thus far not explored. Beyond the border-line of slumber the investigator may not pass with his common-sense rule and test. Sleep with softest touch locks all the gates of our physical sense and lulls to rest the conscious will—the disciplinarian of our waking thoughts. Then the spirit wrenches itself free from the sinewy arms of reason and like a winged courser spurns the firm green earth and speeds away upon wind and cloud, leaving neither trace nor footprint by which science may track its flight and bring us knowledge of the distant, shadowy country that we nightly visit. When we come back from the dream-realm, we can give no reasonable report of what we met there. But once across the border, we feel at home as if we had always lived there and had never made any excursions into this rational, daylight world.

My dreams do not seem to differ very much from the dreams of other people. Some of them are coherent and safely hitched to an event or a conclusion. Others are inconsequent and fantastic. All attest that in Dreamland there is no such thing as repose. We are always up and doing with a mind for any adventure. We act, strive, think, suffer, and are glad to no purpose. We leave outside the portals of Sleep all troublesome incredulities and vexatious speculations as to probability. I float wraithlike upon clouds in and out among the winds, without the faintest notion that I am doing anything unusual. In Dreamland I find little that is altogether strange...

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