The "Dream-Vision" motif goes back to some of the earliest literatures. With this literary device, a character has a dream or a vision (it’s often not clear which it is) that imparts some understanding, knowledge, or wisdom — or it simply allows the dreamer to act as an observer of events while detached from the action.
A number of Dream-Visions occur, for instance, in the Bible when Jacob sees a ladder extending to the sky, with the angels going up and down the ladder. Another is in the book of Daniel: Nebuchadnezzar's dream. Chaucer uses the Dream-Vision in his Parliament of Fowls and House of Fame. One fabulous work from the Victorian era uses it for almost the entire novel: George DuMaurier's Peter Ibbetson. And C. S. Lewis uses it in his short (but not thin) novel The Great Divorce.
In most cases, the Dream-Vision has the same "feel" to it: the "dreamer" cannot tell if it is an actual vision or an ordinary dream. Keats shows this precisely in his "Ode to Psyche":
Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see
The winged Psyche with awaken'd eyes?
In such events, the Dream-Vision is indistinguishable from reality.
There's yet another type of dream: a "Visitation." Think of Mary and the angel's Visitation. The book of Daniel also records such visitations: the angel Gabriel says to Daniel, "Do not be afraid, Daniel, for from the first day that
you purposed to understand and to humble yourself before your God, your
words were heard, and I have come in response to them." And elsewhere there are similar visitations.
Sheldon Vanauken, in his memoir A Severe Mercy, records that he dreamt of his deceased wife, Davy, on various occasions. One such dream he recounts:
I went to sleep in the grass and dreamt of Davy. The dream harked back to a summer afternoon in England when she and I, travelling [sic] to a nearby village on a doubledecker bus, had yielded to a shared and wordless impulse to get off the bus and walk. But the dream seemed to me so much future and present as well as past that I wrote a poem of it:
The last quatrain of that poem is,
Yet was it but a dream? Or my dream only?
Somewhere are you remembering, too?
Or is it only I, remembering, lonely,
And waiting still for you?
While this dream is not a "Visitation" dream, and despite Vanauken questioning its reality, he does recount one dream that is definitively a "Visitation":
"But now I had a dream — the "Oxford-Vision Dream" — so detailed, so significant, so completely unlike anything I ever dreamt before or after, that the great question was whether to believe that it represented a reality. I was as aware of its significance during the dream as I was afterwards. When I dreamed it, there at Mole End [their house in America], I was about to sail for England; but in the dream I was already there, in Oxford. If the dream did represent truth — if I was dreaming true — then it was of God."
He then recounts the dream-vision. It is too long to reproduce here: you'll have to read it for yourself in A Severe Mercy. But: Vision or Reality? The astounding reality of it leaves Vanauken (and his readers) asking "What was I to make of this extraordinary dream? Was it just a dream? Or something more? [....] It left me with a serene, peaceful happiness that lasted a long time."
Many will no doubt say this is merely another form of regular dream. Either way, a Visitation dream, such as Vanauken's — and such as I have so often had — carries immense significance.
Occasionally, throughout my decades to today, I have Visitation dreams in which I see old friends. We talk. And then I wake as if I had actually met with them. This sounds perfectly ordinary. But the person's tone of voice, the person's look of the eye, the person's laugh, expressions — all aspects are astoundingly singular to that person, just as the person actually is. Absolutely nothing that occurs in these dreams is strange or disoriented. They only carry some sense of importance, of significance, and of deeply shared connection. But the events in them are completely normal, as in actual life. And so the reality and significance of them lingers throughout not merely one day but often for several days afterwards.
While I have a spiritual outlook on life as a Christian, I am definitely not one for "spiritualist" bunk or for messing about with a variety of spirits along New-Agey lines — nor the sort of spiritualism that Conan Doyle, for instance, messed with and which was common after the First World War as people tried to contact their dead who were lost in the war. None of that. And whereas people write about dreams and visitations by the dead and by spirits, my dreams have been only about about people who are living. None of this takes away from Vanauken's account: as he and C. S. Lewis agreed about the above "Oxford-Vision Dream," "if the dead do stay with us for a time, it might be allowed partly so that we may hold on to something of their reality." If that is true, the significance here is just what is said in the Bible: God is not the God of the dead, but of the living — and the "departed" are, for Christians, not dead. It's why Lewis said to Vanauken as they parted at their last meeting, "I shan't say goodbye — Christians never say goodbye."
What strikes me most is what Vanauken said about the Visitation dream:
"It seemed to correspond to some actuality, some real spiritual event."
This is precisely and keenly what I have experienced each time I had one of these Visitation dreams, and, although I've read his book, I do not recall reading Van's sentence before today — before writing this post.
For me, these Visitation dreams have occurred periodically through four decades and have astounded me. There, sitting on a dock — a friend (again, a person who is living today, not someone who has passed away), and — knowing it is a dream — we nevertheless talk about our current lives, just as we would if we actually ran into each other.
It is, frankly, like resuming an on-going conversation that has continued in the background of life through the years. And the meeting is not in any respect a surprise; there is no sudden "Oh! You're here!" Not in the least. It is simply a calm resuming of a conversation. There we are, sitting on a bench, and again, along a walk, there, in the path is the friend. And again, along the ocean shore. And again elsewhere, always the same, is the easily resumed talk, and one might bring up a long-ago, agreed upon word that both know but is now decades away. And so it goes: completely unremarkable in the events of the dream, all very, very real, and...then awake.
During some of these dreams, I have wakened, then gone back to sleep, only for the dream and conversation to continue. And in waking from one of these Visitation dreams, there is a depth of calm, a very focused quietness I experience, and thoughtfulness — and not for merely brief moments afterward. These senses last a long time as I ponder not what the dream "means" — I never try to puzzle a meaning out of it — but only reconsider what was said, what was felt, what happened, how the person talked, looked — that laugh, peculiar to them, just as they always had. And I ponder the sense of having visited the person, just as you would in running into an old friend and in spending an hour together. In whatever way one of these dreams may end, I feel long afterward, often for days, as if I've actually met with them.
One more thing. Vanauken said very wisely, "The disappearance of the grief is not followed by happiness. It is followed by emptiness." He, of course, was speaking of the actual grief of losing his wife — the natural course of grief lessening as the years went on. But similarly, a Visitation dream does not produce elation. It produces a distinct emptiness in that, yes — there is joy that an old friend has again been seen — but upon waking from the dream or vision, their absence is more profound: the person is not there.
Precisely. That is the emptiness. And, of course, you come to realize after each individual dream — if such a thing has been real — it may have been the last conversation two old friends will ever have together....
I've never called, emailed, or texted to see if someone has had the same dream — even if I knew how to contact them. But if they had such a dream as well? That would be uncanny, not least if it were at the very same hour.
But how can it possibly be so very real?
I have no answer for that.
