Image: the red west window of the first Goetheanum showed the way to imaginary recognition. (Urs Schwendener (ed.): Anthroposophy—an encyclopaedia in 14 volumes, Volume 5, pp. 270/71)
The first, and to date only, time I cried in a dream was Monday, 24 June 2024. I was with an old school acquaintance, Dick Linkogel, and we were in woods close to our old school in Yorkshire. The woods where we walked were on a raised plateau of ground, which fell away down a gradient to our left, six or eight feet. The ground was planted with many trees and covered with leaves. It was autumn. A third, and possibly fourth, parties were also present, probably old schoolmates as well, I don’t know, but people I knew and felt comfortable with. Dick had gone ahead a little way and was looking out over where the rise was to our left. “Do you remember the ...?” whatever it was, he asked. It was the name of the field he was looking towards. “In our day,” I replied, “the fields all had numbers or names, like the Second Eleven practice field.” That was, in fact, more or less true, but I don’t think we used the term practice, it was the first FIFTEEN pitch, or second FIFTEEN pitch. Dreams can be confusing, because we didn’t play football as a school sport, we played rugby.
Dick was looking down the rise, across a gap between the tall, brown-leaved trees, and I caught up to him and turned to see what he was looking at. Where the rise levelled off below, for perhaps five or ten metres, was a simple grass field, and beyond that, was a graveyard. In it were standing memorials and graves of people I had known at school. People like the garrulous Dave Smith, who had taken his own life shortly after we’d left school, the mountaineer Robert Uttley, who had died of pneumonia on Annapurna III when he was 21 years of age, Geoffrey Addison whose aunt lived at Bayton Lane, Dr. Mark Beresford, whose hair never saw a comb from one month to the next: those with whom I had been educated, and who already, now, ahead of me, had departed the world that you and I know. Dotted throughout the graveyard, flowers had been placed here and there. It was a contained area, like the plot of a single terrace house in a row of terrace houses, long, thin and straight. I fell to my knees when I recognised what it was, and then I wept. Dry tears, until my lungs were utterly devoid of air, then unable to haul my breath, weeping, weeping, weeping, until I awoke. I had not in fact wept, my eyes were dry. Such an impression the dream cut into me that I can recall it now in this detail, a half hour later.
It reminded me of the first time I dreamed in Dutch. Perfect Dutch—well, everything is perfect in dreams, is it not (even with an 11-man rugby team)? And I recalled the time I was visited by Walter, a man who was killed a few years back, by an enormous machine that he was repairing. He was a technician, sent to Ghent to repair a large industrial machine, which he needed to crawl inside. By mistake, somebody—a young trainee—switched the machine on whilst he was in it, and it crushed him. I only learned of the tragedy a year later when a mutual acquaintance of ours happened to mention it on an excursion to Brussels in the latter half of 2020, during the Covid pandemic. I was so shocked at Walter’s demise, I dreamed he came to say, “Thank you.” I swear I felt someone lie down on my bed beside me, and, in my dreams, I petulantly croaked out, “No, this is my bed!”, whereupon the sensation of the companion on the bed ceased, and I realised what had happened and opened my eyes. The black curtains were drawn to, and beside them I saw a round silver visage, which smiled at me, compassionately, benevolently. It was shrouded in a dark cape and wore a hood. I shook my head and fully awoke and saw where the hood had disappeared out of the window, which, I was to find, was unlatched, even though I knew it had been secured the previous weekend. I switched the lamp on and saw that what I had seen was indeed there, it was the upper left-hand corner of the drapes, being the place at which the pointed hood had fled.
I rang my medium friend, who advised me to burn sage in all the corners of the room, to open the window and reassure the spirits that all was well, that I thanked them for their concern, and that they could return to where they had come from—I would be fine. I did that two nights in a row and I think that it worked, because I never again saw the ghost of Walter. But I think of him often, about how kindly he was, and about the fun he and I had together, talking about his collection of Smart motor cars, at his beautiful home in Denderleeuw, and other things. His life was tragically cut short by a silly accident, which was obviously important enough for the government inspectorate of labour to mount an inquiry. The irony is that Walter came back, to me, of all people. Perhaps he visited others as well, but what he said to me by coming on that visit, was that he was well. That the end, as we see it, is not the end, and that the human spirit has as much opportunity for energetic life on the other side of death as it has on this side. Merely, the energy is different.
I believe that a great deal of man’s quest in this world is not that he seeks his own betterment or even that he seeks the advancement of the human race. Joseph Lister’s antiseptics and Alexander Fleming’s penicillin, Robert Oppenheimer’s atomic science and Henry Ford’s automotive factories all make for a life that is safer, more enduring, more comfortable, more amenable. But these are not the quest of mankind.
The quest of mankind, and he will, it is certain, attain it some day, is to ultimately achieve in this material world the equanimity, the supreme reign of love above all, which exists beyond this world, in the next. When that force of love exists unforced and unfeigned in every corner of this world of ours, then the next world and this world will become one, the Revelation will be complete and this world will end, and the next will be universal.
If, on this, you cast doubt, then know that doubt paralyses the mind, which then paralyses all action and ensures the defeat of that which is doubted. And if you fear Revelation, then you have a sure means at your disposal to avert it: your doubts.