DREAMS AND INSPIRATIONS.

Shannon News, 25 October 1921, Page 3

DREAMS AND INSPIRATIONS.

It is one of the mysteries of sleep that under its magic influence men are sometimes inspired to do things which are impossible in their wakeful moments. Robert Louis Stevenson, the famous essayist, did not conceal - the fact that much of his inspiration came to him during his hours of"sliimber. “The Brownies," he said, “do half my work during sleep. I'have always been a great dreamer and many of my dreams have been horrible ' night-*' mares. In others I have wandered all over the earth, have explored strange 1 countries and cities, and read more wonderful books than could be fond I in any library." j ©f Coleridge and “Kubla Khan" the | following strange story is told. The j poet had fallen asleep in his chair I after reading the following lines in 1 Purchas’ “Pilgrimage": “Here the j Khan Kubla commanded a palace to { be built and a stately garden there- ( unto; and thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall.” “In my sleep,” lie sam, “1 Ureamea

*two hundred lines of beautiful poetry. The images rose up oelore me without any sensation or consciousness t;i my part. When*l awoke, the fines j were vivid in my' memory, and I began to write them.” As % ill luck would have it, however, a friend called to see him before he had completed his task; and when, an hour later, he sat down to continue his work, his memory was a blank, His wonderful dream-poem was thus lost to the world. Dr. Anna Kingsford, a well known writer of a generation ago, declared that almost every fine she published had come to her during sleep. 01 one of her books she wrote: “These chronicles are not the result of any conscious, effort of imagination. They are .records of dreams occurring at intervals during the last lew years.” It was to dreams that the world owes Dante’s immortal “Divine Comedy”; Voltaire’s “Henriade,” which “occurred to me in spite of myself, and in which I have no part”; and part a,t least of Campbell’s “Lochiel’s Warning.”