Yes, I dreamed a dream.They tease me now,
telling me it was only a dream. But does it
matter whether it was a dream or reality,
if the dream made known to me the truth? ...
Let it be a dream, so be it, but that real life of which you make so much
I had meant to extinguish by suicide, and my dream, my dream — oh, it
revealed to me a different life, renewed, grand and full of power!
Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented
with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish
of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing
them at all, as, for instance, through space and time. Dreams seem to be
spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart,
and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams,
what utterly incomprehensible things happen to it!
The children of the sun, the children of their sun — oh, how beautiful
they were!Never had I seen on our own earth such beauty in mankind.
Only perhaps in our children, in their earliest years, one might find,
some remote faint reflection of this beauty. The eyes of these happy
people shone with a clear brightness.Their faces were radiant with
the light of reason and fullness of a serenity that comes of perfect
understanding, but those faces were gay; in their words and voices
there was a note of childlike joy.
Oh, from the first moment, from the first glance at them, I understood
it all! It was the earth untarnished by the Fall;...
They lived just in such a paradise as that in which, according to all
the legends of mankind, our first parents lived...
the only difference was that all this earth was the same paradise.
These people, laughing joyfully, thronged round me and caressed me;
they took me home with them, and each of them tried to reassure me.
Oh, they asked me no questions, but they seemed, I fancied, to know
everything without asking, and they wanted to make haste to smoothe
away the signs of suffering from my face.
Well, granted that it was only a dream, yet the sensation of the love
of those innocent and beautiful people has remained with me for ever,
and I feel as though their love is still flowing out to me from over there.
I have seen them myself, have known them and been convinced; I loved them,
I suffered for them afterwards.
Oh, I understood at once even at the time that in many things I could
not understand them at all … But I soon realised that their knowledge
was gained and fostered by intuitions different from those of us on earth,
and that their aspirations, too,were quite different...
They showed me their trees, and I could not understand the intense
love with which they looked at them; it was as though they were
talking with creatures like themselves.And perhaps I shall not be
mistaken if I say that they conversed with them. Yes, they had found
their language, and I am convinced that the trees understood them.
They looked at all Nature like that — at the animals who lived in
peace with them and did not attack them, but loved them, conquered
by their love. They pointed to the stars and told me something about
them which I could not understand, but I am convinced that they were
somehow in touch with the stars, not only in thought, but by some
living channel.
They had no temples, but they had a real living and uninterrupted sense
of oneness with the whole of the universe; they had no creed, but they
had a certain knowledge that when their earthly joy had reached the limits
of earthly nature, then there would come for them, for the living and for
the dead, a still greater fullness of contact with the whole of the universe.
They looked forward to that moment with joy, but without haste, not pining
for it, but seeming to have a foretaste of it in their hearts, of which
they talked to one another.
They sang the praises of nature, of the sea, of the woods. They liked
making songs about one another, and praised each other like children;
they were the simplest songs,but they sprang from their hearts and went
to one's heart. And not only in their songs but in all their lives
they seemed to do nothing but admire one another.
It was like being in love with each other,
but an all-embracing,universal feeling.
I have seen the truth; I have seen and I know that people can be
beautiful and happy without losing the power of living on earth.
I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind.
And it is just this faith of mine that they laugh at.
I am a ridiculous person. Now they call me a madman. That would be
a promotion if it were not that I remain as ridiculous in their eyes
as before. But now I do not resent it, they are all dear to me now,
even when they laugh at me — and, indeed, it is just then that they
are particularly dear to me.
I could join in their laughter — not exactly at myself, but through
affection for them, if I did not feel so sad as I look at them.
Sad because they do not know the truth and I do know it.
Oh, how hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth!
But they won't understand that. No, they won't understand it.
A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream?
I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass
(that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it.
And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything
could be arranged at once!
The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing,
and that's everything;nothing else is wanted — you will find out at
once how to arrange it all.
