I dreamed, in this semi-awake state, that I was in a small circular room hung with red velvet, with a cushioned seat running round the walls. The smallness of the room, and the red hangings and furniture, for everything was red, oppressed me dreadfully; but what troubled me most was that I was quite alone and at a great height. How I had been lured there I did not know, but cunning and treachery of some strange kind had been involved in it.

Suddenly I realized I was in a star, millions of miles from ever one I knew, and that the circular room was really the inside of the star. Its smallness, and particularly the oppressive softness and elegance of its furnishings, the cushioned softness of a padded cell, filled me with such fear and forsakenness that I could hardly breathe. But worst of all was the dreadful sensation of height. I searched the walls, and at last saw, as if it were my salvation, a small window. I went over to the window and opened it, then climbed on to the sill and looked down. Far below I could see a little bank of cloud touched by a faint radiance, and I knew that on the other side of it was the earth.

An overpowering longing to be down there came over me. I lifted my hands over my head and dived. I remember nothing after this until I cut through the cloud and caught sight of the earth still so far beneath me that I could see all one side of it. I saw that it was a great grey ball completely covered with ice.

I was quite near it before I realized that I should be broken to pieces by my fall, and at that my soul shot out of my body and hung on the air a little above the ground, watching my body hurtling down. I saw it striking the ice and lying outspread and shattered: I looked at it objectively, with a touch of pity, but with no fear.

After a while a black, smooth-skinned animal somewhat like a walrus, but much bigger, came out of a hole in the ice, went over to my body, and sniffed it. The great beast looked sad and kindly, but after sniffing my body ate it up in a businesslike way and went back into the hole again.

I waited still, hanging on the air, for I knew that something else would happen.

And after a while I saw myself coming out of the hole, reborn, with a sun-coloured serpent wrapped round my breast, its head resting on my shoulder. As I walked on new grass sprang under my feet and on either side of me.

SOURCE: The Story and the Fable by Edwin Muir (1940). Muir grew up on the island of Wyre in the remote, timeless Orkney Islands off Scotland, but was orphaned as a teen and struggled to survive in Glasgow; most of his siblings died.

LATER

I realize that this dream... would have to be put down to naive spiritual vanity if it was really invented by me and did not 'come' to me, as I felt at the time it did, and as I feel still: it was not 'I' who dreamt it, but something else which the psychologists call the racial unconscious, and for which there are other names.

--Edwin Muir

EDITOR'S NOTES

• Other names: Muir means the soul. Having seen his family die one by one in the Dickensian hell that was Glasgow in 1900, he had lost his faith in traditional Christianity, and was studying Nietzsche's stark philosophy ("God is dead").
• The star: Muir's substitute faith? The cramped red velvet room, like the parlor of a cheap Victorian whorehouse instead of Heaven, could well be the seductive notion of Nietzsche's uncaring Superman--narrow, lonely, intolerable. Or it could be the smug Calvinism that tolerated the Glasgow slums...
• The frozen Earth he falls back to--no mystery here, for he describes his life after being orphaned as numb, bare survival. Global winter.
• Dying in the land of the great ice, being eaten, taken underground, reborn: a full-blown Siberian shamanic initiation! He passes the test, staying calm and waiting for his rebirth in a form that can re-green his world.
• The vision's promise came true; Muir thawed, regained a sense of spiritual purpose beyond bare survival, married happily, became a poet. Visions like this led to a spiritual rebirth, if in a less traditional form.

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