Kipling and Dreams

Childhood terror in a dream of shipwreck  When Kipling takes up the notion of dream in "The Red Lamp (Civil and Military Gazette, July 1889) it is again as a device for presenting terror. At one level it’s a vivid, highly commercial little sketch, drawing on his new expertise in ships’ fittings, acquired during his recent voyage between Calcutta and San Francisco on the way back to England. It was a journey charged with more emotion from the past than he perhaps understood. The story evokes nothing less than the threat of complete annihilation. During a hot night on shipboard, his narrator finds a space to sleep right in the bows of the ship, a setting chosen to make plausible his ensuing vision. The glare of a red lamp from another steamship warns him it is approaching on a collision course. He can’t understand why the alarm is not raised: he is alone in seeing the approaching danger. He watches, paralysed, as the vessels smash together, before being woken to find it was just a dream. It’s scarcely a story at all, in spite of its concrete detail and elaborate description, since the key moment occurs when the narrator wakes to find it was all a dream. The horror evaporates. Yet the feeling which the dream vision communicates is remarkable in its helpless terror. It might make sense, noting the moment in his life when "The Red Lamp" was written, to link his choice of this particular image of horror with the violent impact on him as a child in Southsea when his inner world was overturned and all but destroyed.  All the circumstances suggest that at the time of writing "The Red Lamp" in 1889, Kipling was emotionally exposed. He was between worlds, out on his travels having chosen to give up the security of his place in India in order to try his luck in London. That was the point of his trip for this man of twenty-three. Yet in effect he was repeating the move which had brought him, as a small child, from Bombay to Southsea. As if in preparation or self-defence, only a few months earlier, in writing the story "Baa Baa, Black Sheep" (The Week’s News, December 21 1888), he had taken himself back to the world of desolation in which he’d lived between five and eleven. His sister, Trix, may have claimed, decades afterwards, that he exaggerated the misery of those years, but her experience was inevitably different as a younger child, a girl, who was specially favoured. Mrs Edmonia Hill, in whose Allahabad home Kipling was a paying guest at the time of writing "Baa Baa Black Sheep", noted the ‘towering rage’ brought on in him by working on it. He can scarcely have anticipated this violent upheaval. Describing straightforward unhappiness, if that had been all he had to deal with, might well have been therapeutic but Kipling had chosen to revisit a time in his early development when his perception of reality and his very being were under attack. It doesn’t seem too much to claim that by the time his Aunt Georgie set about rescuing him, he was showing signs of something close to psychosis. In taking himself back, finding words to make the past live again by the act of writing, he had raised demons: the dark faces, perhaps, of the welcome Daemon of his creativity. For in spite of all the turbulence, Kipling retained artistic control over his volatile material, as ‘Punch’, the name he chose for the small boy who stands for himself.  Hindustani was Kipling’s first language and it never left him. As a small child in Bombay he had to be reminded to speak English when he joined his parents in the drawing-room. As a grown man, when he chose to name his young hero ‘Punch’, it had the effect of playing on the Hindustani meaning of the word and of reinforcing his personal stake in the story. In English the name ‘Punch’ is a real oddity but in Hindustani the word ‘panch’ carries the meaning both of ‘five’, the age at which Kipling was deposited in Southsea, and ‘perplexity’.  It’s not possible to claim with certainty that this choice was fully conscious, though it is indisputable that in maturity Kipling delighted in planting clues to make his readers work. Taken together, ‘five’ and ‘perplexity’ identify mental confusion as the lasting damage imposed on the five-year-old Kipling and described in "Baa Baa Black Sheep" . In "The Brushwood Boy" (1895), as a man of thirty, Kipling would come to explore the psychological consequences of this clash between what I would call true and false experience, when outside teaching seeks to displace what has been authentically registered by the self. But for the moment, in "The Red Lamp" Kipling simply generated an image of looming annihilation, in the ship bearing remorselessly down on his own vessel. In naming it as a mere dream, Kipling the writer was able to contain the terror he knew so well, reducing it to literary capital. Childhood terror arrives in the present: the return of the repressed  "At the End of the Passage" (1890) represents Kipling’s first mature attempt to move beyond merely manipulating the fear he was so skilled at provoking in his readers. The story, dense and satisfying in its detail of the lonely lives of Englishmen employed in colonial service in India, is framed by the weekly get-togethers of four men. Isolated by the nature of their different professions they are struggling to support each other through the Hot Weather. At its heart stands the crisis of a man who can’t allow himself to sleep because he fears a particular dream. In this dream he is chased along corridors by a blind face that cries and can’t wipe its eyes. ‘If I’m caught, I die, I die,’ Hummil, the engineer, cries in horror.  It’s difficult to avoid noticing that the language Kipling chooses to describe Hummil’s panic specifically invokes both childhood experience and the threat of hell as punishment: ‘He stood at the doorway in the expression of his lost innocence. He had slipped back into terrified childhood’ the narrator tells us. ‘It has made every night hell to me; and yet I’m not conscious of having done anything wrong,’ Hummil at last confides to Spurstow, the doctor. One effect of this eruption of a child self into the life of the grown man is that Hummil begins to be confronted with the figure of himself. He meets his double, sitting at the table in front of him.Kipling works up the reader’s fascinated alarm with the greatest skill, drawing on an old superstition to assert that: 'the simulacrum is in all respects real except that it cast no shadow’. When Hummil is found dead, ‘In the staring eyes was written terror beyond the expression of any pen’. The Indian servant’s explanation echoes Hummil’s own talk of being chased. At the same time it is cast in the language of "The Phantom Rickshaw": ‘my master has descended into the Dark Places and there has been caught because he was not able to escape with sufficient speed.’ As a final frisson we are led to believe that with his camera the doctor has caught a specific image, one that is cunningly left unnamed, in the eyes of the dead man. The image is so terrifying that the doctor immediately destroys the film and even the camera. This was thrilling and utterly saleable, though maybe also a kind of cop-out, in advancing a mysterious ‘Indian’ explanation of Hummil’s distress. Or was it a challenge to the reader to make sense of all the cues he was offering? Kipling was tracing the movements of the inner world through the images of his fiction, at a time when a language for naming that world and its processes was only starting to be developed in the west. Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreamswasn’t published until 1900, while Freud was yet to connect the uncanny with the return of the repressed. He would also go on to link these with the appearance of a double and with regression to a time in the life of the individual when the ego was not yet sharply differentiated from the external world and from other persons. Freud arrived at these formulations, still not published when Kipling composed "At the End of the Passage", in part by reflecting on works of fiction. It was by allowing his imagination to draw from his own inner depths that Kipling made such connections for himself.

Dreams which invite the reader's interpretation: laying a trail  In comparing Hummil’s experience—and that of characters in other stories—with what had happened to Kipling as a child, it is not my intention to diminish Kipling’s highly crafted works to fragments of autobiography. Rather, I intend to suggest a source for his exceptional analytic insight. The states of psychological disturbance he identifies are not unique for they are caused by an experience that is widely shared. They reflect the impact on the sensitive developing mind of Christian teachings, particularly those regarding guilt and punishment. Kipling has planted clues to the source of Hummil’s original distress: a piety that offers a misleading picture of the world, one passed on by mothers. Remembering how the narrator spoke of him as a frightened child, while Hummil himself spoke of the torments of hell, the reader picks up a resonance with a scene that the writer had carefully laid out close to the story’s opening. The bored men, having abandoned their game, are knocking aimlessly about Hummil’s bungalow, when one of them, Mottram, strumming on the piano, glides into the Evening Hymn. Hummil, like the others sweating in one hundred and one degrees of heat, and on edge, as he explains from lack of sleep, responds with a bitter speeded up chant of the words.:“It ought to go to “The Grasshopper’s Polka”, he remarks. Linking the hymn with a popular piece of dance music for piano in this way is an index of Hummil’s disturbance, for it approaches deliberate blasphemy. Glory to thee, my God, this night For all the blessings of the light.'

Reincaranation, dream and writing  Trance and reverie, waking states in which the everyday forms of perception give place, are linked with dream in "The Finest Story in the World" (1891). Charlie Mears, a bank clerk who yearns to be a writer, is the subject of its study rather than its hero. Endowed with an immensely detailed knowledge of life as a galley slave and as a northern pirate, he doesn’t appear to question where that knowledge comes from. Nor can he write it: on the page his work is leaden. His speaking voice alone is able to carry the story. It’s when he’s sleepy, about to go to bed or gazing spellbound into the fire that he gains access to it. But when he is utterly vulnerable, asleep, that’s the moment whe when thenightmare’ in which he experiences his own death sweeps over him. Writing in the first person, Kipling inserts himself in the story, as a young man in London, a figure very close to his actual position at that time. Emphasising his own identity as a writer, Charlie’s mentor and interlocutor, allows him to raise questions about inspiration and originality, before providing an answer designed to thrill Kipling’s own readers with assertions concerning reincarnation. Those assertions may also be designed to calm Kipling himself. He had learned that as a writer he was at times taken over by a power beyond his conscious control, his ‘Daemon’ as he named it, which brought those intuitions of guilt and death he developed in writing "The Phantom Rickshaw". He needed some framework for understanding what was happening to him. It may have been a relief to arrive at the formulation of a ‘half-memory falsely called imagination.’  The power of what Charlie recounts, his fragments of narrative and of description, remain striking. Yet the story itself is so distorted by the writer’s personal need to establish an explanation for those bursts of inspired talk, that it is dragged down. A Hindu acquaintance, Grish Chunder, is unconvincingly introduced, with discussions meant to demonstrate that the East, with its faith in reincarnation, can accommodate Charlie and his tales. Chunder can explain it all and how it will end: “Charlie will remember a little and a little less and he will call it dreams” .  More disturbing, to today’s readers at least, is the assertion that Charlie’s gift will evaporate once he comes to feel that he’s in love with a woman, as though something pristine in him will be killed off, and with it access to what is truly known. It’s awkward, a place where the pattern of Kipling’s own fantasies— or is it his buried memories? — come poking through. The reader senses strain, too, in the repeated assertion that some writing, some knowledge, is forbidden by ‘The Lords of Life and Death’: the narrator says he would like to write the story of Charlie’s former lives but feels that he must not do so. One reason, he claims, is that readers would say that he made it up out of other men’s books. But the intimation of veto is stronger and more diffused than that: the intuition of a past death, and the sense of a knowledge that is forbidden, weave together, closing the way. To the end of his life Kipling remained uneasy about being so porous, so open to knowledge he could not account for, and uncomfortable with his sometimes uncanny power of intuition. In Something of Myself, which was in late draft at the time of his death, he describes two such occasions which left him baffled. In 1913, when he was lying out watching manoeuvres near Aldershot, the weather conditions put him in mind of South Africa and the Boer War. In imagination he felt the pressure of all the British dead from that war, seeing them forming and flickering before him in the heat. (Readers may see a link with his story "The Army of a Dream" (1904), but Kipling himself failed to make that connection.) His notion came to obsess him. In the end, however, he drew back from writing it up for publication because he didn’t want to attract discussion of his ‘psychical experience’. ‘And I am in no way psychic’, he stoutly if unconvincingly declared. He believed that his sister Trix’s psychical experiments had contributed to her breakdowns. That disclaimer was closely followed in his memoir with an account of an exactly prophetic dream, quite prosaic but perfectly exact in its detail, which came to him in 1922. Six weeks before the ceremony took place, the dream precisely anticipated his experience in Westminster Abbey when he was present for the dedication by the Prince of Wales of a memorial to the dead of the Great War. For Kipling, it was an unsought example of forbidden knowledge: he had 'passed beyond the bounds of ordinance ... But how, and why, had I been shown an unreleased roll of my life-film?’, he asked. Charlie’s memories—if they do belong to him—or his visions, are involuntary, like his creator’s, and appear to give a clue to the workings of the world, workings specifically not recognised under Christianity. Grish Chunder, the Hindu, is brought in to dramatise the existence of a different culture and to make its reading of the world actively present in the tale.

The words of the hymn are totally at odds with the reality of the here and now: instead of ‘the blessings of the light’ the day is clouded by ‘the gloom of a November day in London’. More critically, Hummil’s jangled tone indicates that he is angrily aware of betrayal. The trust in protection from the powers of darkness that is implied by the hymn has proved empty. Hummil’s nights are haunted. For the others, however, the hymn-tune provokes idealised fantasies of home, in contrast with the alien world in which they actually find themselves.:  “Summer evenings in the country, stained-glass window, light going out, and you and she jamming your heads together over one hymnbook”, said Mottram.’ But are these truly the ‘sacred recollections’ that Lowndes claims, or are they to be read as wishful thinking? They appear to be finely judged on the writer’s part, in order to wake scepticism in the reader. When Spurstow the doctor chimes in:‘“Also mothers. I can just recollect my mother singing me to sleep with that when I was a little chap,” we are told that‘darkness had fallen on the room’ and ‘they could hear Hummil squirming in his chair’. Something disembodied, neither the narrator nor the characters but the narrative itself, appears to record that assent or endorsement of these pieties are being withheld. http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_dreams.htm#phantom ... the blind face that cries and can't wipe its eyes ...  Kipling and Dreams(by Mary Hamer)  Childhood terror in a dream of shipwreck When Kipling takes up the notion of dream in "The Red Lamp (Civil and Military Gazette, July 1889) it is again as a device for presenting terror. At one level it’s a vivid, highly commercial little sketch, drawing on his new expertise in ships’ fittings, acquired during his recent voyage between Calcutta and San Francisco on the way back to England. It was a journey charged with more emotion from the past than he perhaps understood. The story evokes nothing less than the threat of complete annihilation. During a hot night on shipboard, his narrator finds a space to sleep right in the bows of the ship, a setting chosen to make plausible his ensuing vision. The glare of a red lamp from another steamship warns him it is approaching on a collision course. He can’t understand why the alarm is not raised: he is alone in seeing the approaching danger. He watches, paralysed, as the vessels smash together, before being woken to find it was just a dream. It’s scarcely a story at all, in spite of its concrete detail and elaborate description, since the key moment occurs when the narrator wakes to find it was all a dream. The horror evaporates. Yet the feeling which the dream vision communicates is remarkable in its helpless terror. It might make sense, noting the moment in his life when "The Red Lamp" was written, to link his choice of this particular image of horror with the violent impact on him as a child in Southsea when his inner world was overturned and all but destroyed. All the circumstances suggest that at the time of writing "The Red Lamp" in 1889, Kipling was emotionally exposed. He was between worlds, out on his travels having chosen to give up the security of his place in India in order to try his luck in London. That was the point of his trip for this man of twenty-three. Yet in effect he was repeating the move which had brought him, as a small child, from Bombay to Southsea. As if in preparation or self-defence, only a few months earlier, in writing the story "Baa Baa, Black Sheep" (The Week’s News, December 21 1888), he had taken himself back to the world of desolation in which he’d lived between five and eleven.  His sister, Trix, may have claimed, decades afterwards, that he exaggerated the misery of those years, but her experience was inevitably different as a younger child, a girl, who was specially favoured. Mrs Edmonia Hill, in whose Allahabad home Kipling was a paying guest at the time of writing "Baa Baa Black Sheep", noted the ‘towering rage’ brought on in him by working on it. He can scarcely have anticipated this violent upheaval. Describing straightforward unhappiness, if that had been all he had to deal with, might well have been therapeutic but Kipling had chosen to revisit a time in his early development when his perception of reality and his very being were under attack. It doesn’t seem too much to claim that by the time his Aunt Georgie set about rescuing him, he was showing signs of something close to psychosis. In taking himself back, finding words to make the past live again by the act of writing, he had raised demons: the dark faces, perhaps, of the welcome Daemon of his creativity. For in spite of all the turbulence, Kipling retained artistic control over his volatile material, as ‘Punch’, the name he chose for the small boy who stands for himself.  Hindustani was Kipling’s first language and it never left him. As a small child in Bombay he had to be reminded to speak English when he joined his parents in the drawing-room. As a grown man, when he chose to name his young hero ‘Punch’, it had the effect of playing on the Hindustani meaning of the word and of reinforcing his personal stake in the story. In English the name ‘Punch’ is a real oddity but in Hindustani the word ‘panch’ carries the meaning both of ‘five’, the age at which Kipling was deposited in Southsea, and ‘perplexity’. It’s not possible to claim with certainty that this choice was fully conscious, though it is indisputable that in maturity Kipling delighted in planting clues to make his readers work. Taken together, ‘five’ and ‘perplexity’ identify mental confusion as the lasting damage imposed on the five-year-old Kipling and described in "Baa Baa Black Sheep" . In "The Brushwood Boy" (1895), as a man of thirty, Kipling would come to explore the psychological consequences of this clash between what I would call true and false experience, when outside teaching seeks to displace what has been authentically registered by the self. But for the moment, in "The Red Lamp" Kipling simply generated an image of looming annihilation, in the ship bearing remorselessly down on his own vessel. In naming it as a mere dream, Kipling the writer was able to contain the terror he knew so well, reducing it to literary capital. Childhood terror arrives in the present: the return of the repressed