You shall learn to know their tricks and malicious
inventions, and the queer furnishings of their dwelling sphere. You
shall learn to track them, as it were, - as the dog tracks the game -
by their peculiar scent of gruesomeness. You shall see them unfolding
their loathsome and dark spectacles before you -their battlefields
reeking with blood, their swamps filled with corpses - besmirching your
path with mud, and playing fantastic tricks on you without its causing
you the slightest degree of alarm or fear, or depressing you as it did
before you knew the cause of all these things - because now you
apprehend them in their wretched malignity and dare to face them and,
if need be, duly to chastise them.
These are the creatures that Shelley calls
"The ghastly people of the realm of dreams,"
and of whose miserable existence and restless activity neither he, nor
Goethe, nor any other of the world's sages and seers ever doubted.
Indeed, would not this doubt signify that we are ourselves responsible
for the multitude of horrible, utterly vulgar, heinous and vile or
obscene illusions that menace us at night and yet all bear an
unmistakable imprint of thought and imagination, compiled with reason
and deliberation, and thus betray a thinking mind though a low-thinking
one? Do you not know the dream in which you know yourself to be guilty
of murder, of bloody murder through covetousness, of theft, or of
plotting to kill and inciting the innocent to it -with all the horrid
retinue of fear of discovery and lies upon lies to escape it? And do
you hold your own soul responsible for this? Or do you believe that
chance can beget such artfully contrived complexities?
It was this sort of deception that incited me to indignant defiance.
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