Recently, in 1937, Mr. Herbert Palmer sent me the following description of a recurring dream that has a visionary quality. He entitles it: A DREAM OF HELL.

I have often of recent years dreamed that I was dead and in Hell. Not a Hell of fire and brimstone and physical pain. Not even a Hell of moral suffering and remorse. But a Hell of greyness and drabness and piercing monotony. The landscape is grey and intangible, my actions grey und intangible, and the people I am with though real enough, are grey and incommunicable. Sometimes I am walking or riding through a dismal industrial landscape; but more often I am sitting in grey drab rooms. The whole atmosphere is that of a large dingy railway-station.

But one night, about a year after the termination of the war, my Hell was flooded with piercing moonlight. I was alone, vastly and terribly alone, walking through a wide wilderness of rolling country covered with pine-trees.

Over it soared the moon, a round white moon of piercing anguish, and around me rolled invisible waves of dreadful loneliness. The loneliness was intenser than any earthly loneliness, for it was felt almost as a physical pain. And I was seeking to rid myself of it, seeking to get into touch with human beings, with communicating souls. But nobody and nothing seemed to populate that unending wilderness, nothing save pine-trees. I was dead and in Hell, and quite alone.

By and by I came to a house two storys high. I ascended the stairs and entered a room with a table in the centre. On the other side of the table sat my mother, painting a picture that would never come right. I felt that she would paint for all eternity and it would never come right. She was moaning. The whole room was moaning. The whole lonely world around me was moaning. I wanted to get in touch with her, to get in touch with somebody, but I was cut off. All contact was impossible. Our souls could not touch.

Slowly the white moonlit world passed away and the dawn arose. But it was a grey, comfortless dawn of pelting rain. For a day, nay for a whole season it rained, and then suddenly the sun shone. But what a sun! it was so hot and blazing. And the loneliness had not changed; it was only the temperature of the loneliness that had changed. I was cut off---from both man and God, and still my mother oblivious of me sat on the other side of the table painting a picture that would never come right.

But suddenly I was aware of other people. They were playing tennis in a little court just under the window on the right. Little girls in pink sun-bonnets. I wanted to go out to them, to play and speak with them, but I felt that I could not.

Up and down bounced the balls, breaking pleasantly into the unutterable blankness and monotony of my self-centered life in death. I could not communicate, I could not speak, I could not go down the stairs. I was alone, unutterably alone. Then I awoke.

--R.L. Megroz

EDITOR'S NOTE

Is it just me, or is Megroz smirking a bit? I'm not sure. I am sure I won't join the readers of Mr. Palmer's poetry.

Snark aside, notice that Palmer's hell-dreams do progress:

1. He's alone in a wood. John Muir might find it heaven. Palmer finds it hell. To me that's educational--the dream shows him what he fears & craves.
2. He sees his mom, a frustrated artist. Is this literal? She's inaccessable; did she neglect her kid? This scene fingers the likely source of his loneliness.
3. The dream acquires sun, and action, and color (pink), then makes it clear he has opportunities to join, to play. But he can't act. Self-sabotage!

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: The Dream World by R. L. Megroz, 1939; p.144-5)

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