November 1, 2025 • 16 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Visions of the Night by Ambrose Biers. I hold the
belief that the gift of dreams is a valuable literary endowment, that,
if by some art not now understood, the elusive fancies
that it supplies could be caught and fixed and made
to serve, we should have a literature exceeding fare in
(00:23):
captivity and domestication. The gift could doubtless be wonderfully improved.
As animals bread to service acquire new capacities and powers.
By taming our dreams, we shall double our working hours,
and our most fruitful labor will be done in sleep.
Even as matters are. Dream Land is a tributary province,
(00:44):
as witness Kubla Khan. What is a dream? A loose
and lawless collocation of memories, a disorderly succession of matters
once present in the waking consciousness? It is a resurrection
of the death pale mell ancient and modern, the just
and the unjust, springing from their cracked tombs, each in
(01:08):
his habit as he lived, pressing forward confusedly to have
an audience of the Master of the revel and snatching
one another's garments as they run. Master. No, he has
abdicated his authority, and they have their will of him.
His own is dead and does not rise with the rest.
His judgment, too is gone, and with it the capacity
(01:31):
to be surprised, pained. He may be and pleased, terrified
and charmed, But wonder he cannot feel the monstrous, the preposterous,
the unnatural. These all are simple, right and reasonable. The
ludicrous does not amuse, nor the impossible amaze. The dreamer
is your only true poet. He is of imagination. All
(01:55):
compact imagination is merely memory. Try to imagine something that
you have never observed, experienced, heard of, or read about.
Try to conceive an animal, for example, without body, head, limbs,
or tail, a house without walls or roof. But when awake,
(02:16):
having assistance of will and judgment, we can somewhat control
and direct. We can pick and choose from memory's store,
taking that which serves, excluding, though sometimes with difficulty, what
is not to the purpose. Asleep our fancies inherit us,
(02:36):
they come so grouped, so blended and compounded, the one
with another, so wrought of one another's elements, that the
whole seems new. But the old familiar units of conception
are there anone Beside waking or sleeping, we get from
imagination nothing new but new adjustments. A stuff that dreams
(02:58):
are made on has been gathered by the physical senses
and stored in memory as squirrels hoarde nuts. But one,
at least of the senses contributes nothing to the fabric
of the dream. No one ever dreamed an odor, sight, hearing, feeling,
possibly taste. Are all workers making provision for our night,
(03:21):
the entertainment, But sleep is without a nose. It surprises
that those keen observers, the ancient poets, did not so
describe the drowsy God, and that their obedient servants, the
ancient sculptors, did not so represent him. Perhaps these latter
worthies working for posterity reasoned that time and mischance would
(03:44):
inevitably revise their work in this regard, conforming it to
the facts of nature. Who can so relate a dream
that it shall seem one? No poet has so light
a touch as well, try to write the music of
an old harp. There is a familiar species of the
genus bore penetrator intolerabilis, who, having read a story, perhaps
(04:10):
by some master of style, is at the pains elaborately
to expound its plot for your edification and delight. Then
thinks good Soul, that now you need not read it
under substantially similar circumstances and conditions as the interstate commerce
law hath it, I should not be guilty of the
(04:32):
like offense. But I purpose herein to set forth the
plots of certain dreams of my own, the circumstances and
conditions being as I conceive, dissimilar in this that the
dreams themselves are not accessible to the reader. In endeavoring
to make record of their poorer part, I do not
(04:52):
indulge the hope of a higher success. I have no
salt to put upon the tale of a dream's elusive spirit.
I was walking at dusk through a great forest of
unfamiliar trees. Whence and whither I did not know. I
had a sense of the vast extent of the wood,
a consciousness that I was the only living thing in it.
(05:16):
I was obsessed by some awful spell in expiation of
a forgotten crime committed as I vaguely surmised against the sunrise.
Mechanically and without hope, I moved under the arms of
the giant trees along a narrow trail penetrating the haunted
solitudes of the forest. I came at length to a
(05:37):
brook that flowed darkly and sluggishly across my path, and
saw that it was blood. Turning to the right, I
followed it up a considerable distance, and soon came to
a small circular opening in the forest, filled with a dim,
unreal light, by which I saw in the center of
the opening a deep tank of white marble. It was
(06:00):
filled with blood, and the stream that I had followed
up was its outlet. All round the tank, between it
and the enclosing forest, a space of perhaps ten feet
in breadth, paved with immense slabs of marble, were dead
bodies of men a score. Though I did not count them,
I knew that the number had some significant and portentous
(06:22):
relation to my crime. Possibly they marked the time in
centuries since I had committed it. I only recognized the
fitness of the number, and knew it without counting. The
bodies were naked and arranged symmetrically around the central tank,
radiating from it like spokes of a wheel. The feet
(06:42):
were outward, the heads hanging over the edge of the tank.
Each lay upon its back, its throat cut blood slowly
dripping from the wound. I looked on all this unmoved.
It was a natural and necessary result of my offense,
and did not affect me. But there was something that
filled me with apprehension and terror, A monstrous pulsation beating
(07:06):
with a slow, inevitable recurrence. I do not know which
of the senses it addressed, or if it made its
way to the consciousness through some avenue unknown to science
and experience. The pitiless regularity of this vast rhythm was maddening.
I was conscious that it pervaded the entire forest, and
was a manifestation of some gigantic and implacable malevolence. Of
(07:33):
this dream I have no further recollection. Probably overcome by
a terror which doubtless had its origin in the discomfort
of an impeded circulation, I cried out and was awakened
by the sound of my own voice. The dream whose
skeleton I shall now present, occurred in my early youth.
I could not have been more than sixteen. I am
(07:55):
considerably more now. Yet I recall the incidents as vividly
as when the vision was of an hour's age, and
I lay cowering beneath the bed covering and trembling with
terror from the memory I was alone on a boundless
level in the night. In my bad dreams, I am
always alone, and it is usually night. No trees were
(08:19):
anywhere in sight, no habitations of men, no streams nor hill.
The earth seemed to be covered with a short, coarse
vegetation that was black and stubby, as if the plain
had been swept by fire. My way was broken here
and there as I went forward, with I know not
what purpose, by small pools of water occupying shallow depressions,
(08:43):
as if the fire had been succeeded by rain. These
pools were on every side, and kept vanishing and appearing again,
as heavy dark clouds drove athwart those parts of the
sky which they reflected, and, passing on, disclosed again the
steely glitter of the stars, in whose cold light the
waters shone with a black luster. My course lay toward
(09:06):
the west, where low along the horizon burned a crimson
light beneath long strips of cloud, giving that effect of
measureless distance that I have since learned to look for
in Doray's pictures, where every touch of his hand has
laid a portent and a curse, as I moved, I
saw outlined against this uncanny background, a silhouette of battlements
(09:30):
and towers, which, expanding with every mile of my journey,
grew at last to an unthinkable height and breadth, till
the building subtended a wide angle of vision, yet seemed
no nearer than before. Heartless and hopeless, I struggled on
over the blasted and forbidding plain, and still the mighty
(09:52):
structure grew until I could no longer compass it with
a look, and its towers shut out the stars directly overhead.
Then I passed in at an open portal, between columns
of Cyclopean masonry, whose single stones were larger than my
father's house. Within all was vacancy. Everything was coated with
(10:14):
the dust of desertion. A dim light, the lawless light
of dreams, sufficient unto itself, enabled me to pass from
corridor to corridor, and from room to room, every door
yielding to my hand. In the rooms, it was a
long walk from wall to wall of no corridor did
I ever reach an end. My footfalls gave out that strange,
(10:38):
hollow sound that is never heard but in abandoned dwellings
and tenanted tombs. For hours, I wandered in this awful solitude,
conscious of a seeking purpose, yet knowing not what I sought.
At last, in what I conceived to be an extreme
angle of the building, I entered a room of the
ordinary dimensions, having a single window. Through this I saw
(11:03):
the same crimson light still lying along the horizon in
the measureless reaches of the west, like a visible doom,
and knew it for the lingering fire of eternity. Looking
upon the red menace of its sullen and sinister glare,
there came to me the dreadful truth, which, years later,
as an extravagant fancy, I endeavored to express in verse.
(11:27):
Man is long ages dead in every zone, The angels
all are gone to graves unknown, The devils too are
cold enough at last, and God lies dead before the
great white throne. The light was powerless to dispel the
obscurity of the room, and it was some time before
(11:48):
I discovered, in the farthest angle the outlines of a bed,
and approached it with a prescience of ill. I felt
that here, somehow the bad business of my adventure was
to end with some horrible imax, Yet could not resist
the spell that urged me to the fulfillment. Upon the bed,
partly clothed, laid the dead body of a human being.
(12:11):
It lay upon its back, the arms straight along the sides.
By bending over it, which I did with loathing but
no fear, I could see that it was dreadfully decomposed.
The ribs protruded from the leathern flesh. Through the skin
of the sunken belly could be seen the protuberances of
the spine. The face was black and shriveled, and the lips,
(12:35):
drawn away from the yellow teeth cursed it with a
ghastly grin. A fullness under the closed lids seemed to
indicate that the eyes had survived the general wreck, and
this was true, for as I bent above them, they
slowly opened and gazed into mine with a tranquil, steady regard.
(12:55):
Imagine my horror, how you can. No words of mine
can assist the conception. The eyes were my own, that
vestigial fragment of a vanished race, that unspeakable thing which
neither time nor eternity had wholly effaced, that hateful and
abhorrent scrap of mortality, still sentient after death of God
(13:18):
and the angels. Was I there are dreams that repeat themselves.
Of this class is one of my own, which seems
sufficiently singular to justify its narration. Though truly I fear
the reader will think the realms of sleep or anything
but a happy hunting ground for my night wandering soul.
(13:39):
This is not true. The greater number of my incursions
into dreamland, and I suppose those of most others, are
attended with the happiest results. My imagination returns to the
body like a bee to the hive, loaded with spoil,
which reason assisting is transmuted to honey and stored away
in the cell of memory to be a joy for ever.
(14:03):
But the dream which I am about to relate as
a double character. It is strangely dreadful in the experience,
But the horror it inspires is so ludicrously disproportionate to
the one incident producing it, that in retrospection the fantasy amuses.
I am passing through an open glade in a thinly
(14:23):
wooded country, through the belt of scattered trees that bound
the irregular space. There are glimpses of cultivated fields and
the homes of strange intelligences. It must be near daybreak,
for the moon nearly at full is low in the west,
showing blood red through the mists with which the landscape
is fantastically freaked. The grass about my feet is heavy
(14:47):
with dew, and the whole scene is that of the
morning in early summer, glimmering in the unfamiliar light of
a setting full moon. Near my path is a horse,
visibly and audibly cropping the herbage. It lifts its head
as I am about to pass, regards me, motionless for
a moment, then walks towards me. It is milk white,
(15:10):
mild of mien, and amiable in look. I say to myself,
this horse is a gentle soul, and pause to caress it.
It keeps its eyes fixed upon my own approaches and
speaks to me in a human voice, with human words.
This does not surprise, but terrifies, and instantly I return
(15:32):
to this our world. The horse always speaks my own tongue,
but I never know what it says. I suppose I
vanish from the land of dreams before it finishes expressing
what it has in mind, leaving it no doubt as
greatly terrified by my sudden disappearance as I by its
(15:53):
manner of accosting me. I would give value to know
the purport of its communication. Perhaps some morning I shall
understand and return no more to this our world. End
of Visions of the Night.
Visions of the Night by Ambrose Biers. I hold the
belief that the gift of dreams is a valuable literary endowment, that,
if by some art not now understood, the elusive fancies
that it supplies could be caught and fixed and made
to serve, we should have a literature exceeding fare in
(00:23):
captivity and domestication. The gift could doubtless be wonderfully improved.
As animals bread to service acquire new capacities and powers.
By taming our dreams, we shall double our working hours,
and our most fruitful labor will be done in sleep.
Even as matters are. Dream Land is a tributary province,
(00:44):
as witness Kubla Khan. What is a dream? A loose
and lawless collocation of memories, a disorderly succession of matters
once present in the waking consciousness? It is a resurrection
of the death pale mell ancient and modern, the just
and the unjust, springing from their cracked tombs, each in
(01:08):
his habit as he lived, pressing forward confusedly to have
an audience of the Master of the revel and snatching
one another's garments as they run. Master. No, he has
abdicated his authority, and they have their will of him.
His own is dead and does not rise with the rest.
His judgment, too is gone, and with it the capacity
(01:31):
to be surprised, pained. He may be and pleased, terrified
and charmed, But wonder he cannot feel the monstrous, the preposterous,
the unnatural. These all are simple, right and reasonable. The
ludicrous does not amuse, nor the impossible amaze. The dreamer
is your only true poet. He is of imagination. All
(01:55):
compact imagination is merely memory. Try to imagine something that
you have never observed, experienced, heard of, or read about.
Try to conceive an animal, for example, without body, head, limbs,
or tail, a house without walls or roof. But when awake,
(02:16):
having assistance of will and judgment, we can somewhat control
and direct. We can pick and choose from memory's store,
taking that which serves, excluding, though sometimes with difficulty, what
is not to the purpose. Asleep our fancies inherit us,
(02:36):
they come so grouped, so blended and compounded, the one
with another, so wrought of one another's elements, that the
whole seems new. But the old familiar units of conception
are there anone Beside waking or sleeping, we get from
imagination nothing new but new adjustments. A stuff that dreams
(02:58):
are made on has been gathered by the physical senses
and stored in memory as squirrels hoarde nuts. But one,
at least of the senses contributes nothing to the fabric
of the dream. No one ever dreamed an odor, sight, hearing, feeling,
possibly taste. Are all workers making provision for our night,
(03:21):
the entertainment, But sleep is without a nose. It surprises
that those keen observers, the ancient poets, did not so
describe the drowsy God, and that their obedient servants, the
ancient sculptors, did not so represent him. Perhaps these latter
worthies working for posterity reasoned that time and mischance would
(03:44):
inevitably revise their work in this regard, conforming it to
the facts of nature. Who can so relate a dream
that it shall seem one? No poet has so light
a touch as well, try to write the music of
an old harp. There is a familiar species of the
genus bore penetrator intolerabilis, who, having read a story, perhaps
(04:10):
by some master of style, is at the pains elaborately
to expound its plot for your edification and delight. Then
thinks good Soul, that now you need not read it
under substantially similar circumstances and conditions as the interstate commerce
law hath it, I should not be guilty of the
(04:32):
like offense. But I purpose herein to set forth the
plots of certain dreams of my own, the circumstances and
conditions being as I conceive, dissimilar in this that the
dreams themselves are not accessible to the reader. In endeavoring
to make record of their poorer part, I do not
(04:52):
indulge the hope of a higher success. I have no
salt to put upon the tale of a dream's elusive spirit.
I was walking at dusk through a great forest of
unfamiliar trees. Whence and whither I did not know. I
had a sense of the vast extent of the wood,
a consciousness that I was the only living thing in it.
(05:16):
I was obsessed by some awful spell in expiation of
a forgotten crime committed as I vaguely surmised against the sunrise.
Mechanically and without hope, I moved under the arms of
the giant trees along a narrow trail penetrating the haunted
solitudes of the forest. I came at length to a
(05:37):
brook that flowed darkly and sluggishly across my path, and
saw that it was blood. Turning to the right, I
followed it up a considerable distance, and soon came to
a small circular opening in the forest, filled with a dim,
unreal light, by which I saw in the center of
the opening a deep tank of white marble. It was
(06:00):
filled with blood, and the stream that I had followed
up was its outlet. All round the tank, between it
and the enclosing forest, a space of perhaps ten feet
in breadth, paved with immense slabs of marble, were dead
bodies of men a score. Though I did not count them,
I knew that the number had some significant and portentous
(06:22):
relation to my crime. Possibly they marked the time in
centuries since I had committed it. I only recognized the
fitness of the number, and knew it without counting. The
bodies were naked and arranged symmetrically around the central tank,
radiating from it like spokes of a wheel. The feet
(06:42):
were outward, the heads hanging over the edge of the tank.
Each lay upon its back, its throat cut blood slowly
dripping from the wound. I looked on all this unmoved.
It was a natural and necessary result of my offense,
and did not affect me. But there was something that
filled me with apprehension and terror, A monstrous pulsation beating
(07:06):
with a slow, inevitable recurrence. I do not know which
of the senses it addressed, or if it made its
way to the consciousness through some avenue unknown to science
and experience. The pitiless regularity of this vast rhythm was maddening.
I was conscious that it pervaded the entire forest, and
was a manifestation of some gigantic and implacable malevolence. Of
(07:33):
this dream I have no further recollection. Probably overcome by
a terror which doubtless had its origin in the discomfort
of an impeded circulation, I cried out and was awakened
by the sound of my own voice. The dream whose
skeleton I shall now present, occurred in my early youth.
I could not have been more than sixteen. I am
(07:55):
considerably more now. Yet I recall the incidents as vividly
as when the vision was of an hour's age, and
I lay cowering beneath the bed covering and trembling with
terror from the memory I was alone on a boundless
level in the night. In my bad dreams, I am
always alone, and it is usually night. No trees were
(08:19):
anywhere in sight, no habitations of men, no streams nor hill.
The earth seemed to be covered with a short, coarse
vegetation that was black and stubby, as if the plain
had been swept by fire. My way was broken here
and there as I went forward, with I know not
what purpose, by small pools of water occupying shallow depressions,
(08:43):
as if the fire had been succeeded by rain. These
pools were on every side, and kept vanishing and appearing again,
as heavy dark clouds drove athwart those parts of the
sky which they reflected, and, passing on, disclosed again the
steely glitter of the stars, in whose cold light the
waters shone with a black luster. My course lay toward
(09:06):
the west, where low along the horizon burned a crimson
light beneath long strips of cloud, giving that effect of
measureless distance that I have since learned to look for
in Doray's pictures, where every touch of his hand has
laid a portent and a curse, as I moved, I
saw outlined against this uncanny background, a silhouette of battlements
(09:30):
and towers, which, expanding with every mile of my journey,
grew at last to an unthinkable height and breadth, till
the building subtended a wide angle of vision, yet seemed
no nearer than before. Heartless and hopeless, I struggled on
over the blasted and forbidding plain, and still the mighty
(09:52):
structure grew until I could no longer compass it with
a look, and its towers shut out the stars directly overhead.
Then I passed in at an open portal, between columns
of Cyclopean masonry, whose single stones were larger than my
father's house. Within all was vacancy. Everything was coated with
(10:14):
the dust of desertion. A dim light, the lawless light
of dreams, sufficient unto itself, enabled me to pass from
corridor to corridor, and from room to room, every door
yielding to my hand. In the rooms, it was a
long walk from wall to wall of no corridor did
I ever reach an end. My footfalls gave out that strange,
(10:38):
hollow sound that is never heard but in abandoned dwellings
and tenanted tombs. For hours, I wandered in this awful solitude,
conscious of a seeking purpose, yet knowing not what I sought.
At last, in what I conceived to be an extreme
angle of the building, I entered a room of the
ordinary dimensions, having a single window. Through this I saw
(11:03):
the same crimson light still lying along the horizon in
the measureless reaches of the west, like a visible doom,
and knew it for the lingering fire of eternity. Looking
upon the red menace of its sullen and sinister glare,
there came to me the dreadful truth, which, years later,
as an extravagant fancy, I endeavored to express in verse.
(11:27):
Man is long ages dead in every zone, The angels
all are gone to graves unknown, The devils too are
cold enough at last, and God lies dead before the
great white throne. The light was powerless to dispel the
obscurity of the room, and it was some time before
(11:48):
I discovered, in the farthest angle the outlines of a bed,
and approached it with a prescience of ill. I felt
that here, somehow the bad business of my adventure was
to end with some horrible imax, Yet could not resist
the spell that urged me to the fulfillment. Upon the bed,
partly clothed, laid the dead body of a human being.
(12:11):
It lay upon its back, the arms straight along the sides.
By bending over it, which I did with loathing but
no fear, I could see that it was dreadfully decomposed.
The ribs protruded from the leathern flesh. Through the skin
of the sunken belly could be seen the protuberances of
the spine. The face was black and shriveled, and the lips,
(12:35):
drawn away from the yellow teeth cursed it with a
ghastly grin. A fullness under the closed lids seemed to
indicate that the eyes had survived the general wreck, and
this was true, for as I bent above them, they
slowly opened and gazed into mine with a tranquil, steady regard.
(12:55):
Imagine my horror, how you can. No words of mine
can assist the conception. The eyes were my own, that
vestigial fragment of a vanished race, that unspeakable thing which
neither time nor eternity had wholly effaced, that hateful and
abhorrent scrap of mortality, still sentient after death of God
(13:18):
and the angels. Was I there are dreams that repeat themselves.
Of this class is one of my own, which seems
sufficiently singular to justify its narration. Though truly I fear
the reader will think the realms of sleep or anything
but a happy hunting ground for my night wandering soul.
(13:39):
This is not true. The greater number of my incursions
into dreamland, and I suppose those of most others, are
attended with the happiest results. My imagination returns to the
body like a bee to the hive, loaded with spoil,
which reason assisting is transmuted to honey and stored away
in the cell of memory to be a joy for ever.
(14:03):
But the dream which I am about to relate as
a double character. It is strangely dreadful in the experience,
But the horror it inspires is so ludicrously disproportionate to
the one incident producing it, that in retrospection the fantasy amuses.
I am passing through an open glade in a thinly
(14:23):
wooded country, through the belt of scattered trees that bound
the irregular space. There are glimpses of cultivated fields and
the homes of strange intelligences. It must be near daybreak,
for the moon nearly at full is low in the west,
showing blood red through the mists with which the landscape
is fantastically freaked. The grass about my feet is heavy
(14:47):
with dew, and the whole scene is that of the
morning in early summer, glimmering in the unfamiliar light of
a setting full moon. Near my path is a horse,
visibly and audibly cropping the herbage. It lifts its head
as I am about to pass, regards me, motionless for
a moment, then walks towards me. It is milk white,
(15:10):
mild of mien, and amiable in look. I say to myself,
this horse is a gentle soul, and pause to caress it.
It keeps its eyes fixed upon my own approaches and
speaks to me in a human voice, with human words.
This does not surprise, but terrifies, and instantly I return
(15:32):
to this our world. The horse always speaks my own tongue,
but I never know what it says. I suppose I
vanish from the land of dreams before it finishes expressing
what it has in mind, leaving it no doubt as
greatly terrified by my sudden disappearance as I by its
(15:53):
manner of accosting me. I would give value to know
the purport of its communication. Perhaps some morning I shall
understand and return no more to this our world. End
of Visions of the Night.
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