Iconostasis

According to the opening words of the chronicle of creation, God "created the heaven and the earth" (Gen. 1:1), and this division of all that was created into two has always been recognized as fundamental. So too in the confession of faith we name God the "Maker of things visible and invisible," the Creator of the visible and, equally, the invisible. But these two worlds—the visible world and the invisible world—touch one another. Yet their mutual difference is so great that the question of the boundary of their contact cannot but arise. That boundary divides them, yet it also unites them. How, then, are we to understand it?

Here, as in other questions of metaphysics, our starting point will naturally be what we already know about ourselves. Yes, the life of our own soul provides a foothold for judging this boundary where the two worlds meet, for within us as well life in the visible alternates with life in the invisible, and there are therefore moments — brief moments, extraordinarily compressed moments, sometimes contracted even to an atom of time — when both worlds touch, and we ourselves behold that very point of contact. Within us the veil of the visible is torn apart for an instant, and through its rent — still perceived as such — there breathes an invisible, otherworldly breath: the one world and the other dissolve into each other, and our life falls into a continuous flowing, something like the way hot air rises and shimmers above a source of heat.

Sleep — this is the first and simplest step into the invisible, simplest in the sense that we are entirely accustomed to it. This step may be the lowest, and at least most often is the lowest; yet even sleep, even in its raw state, untrained sleep, catches the soul up into the invisible and gives even the least sensitive among us a foretaste that there is something other than what we are inclined to regard as the whole of life. And we know: on the threshold between sleep and waking, in the passage through the intermediate region between them — that boundary where the two touch — our soul finds itself surrounded by dreams.

There is no need to prove what has long been established: deep sleep — sleep proper, that is, sleep as such — is not accompanied by dreams, and only the half-asleep, half-waking state, precisely the boundary between sleep and wakefulness, is the time — or more accurately, the time-medium — in which dream images arise. The interpretation of dreams according to which they correspond, in the strict sense of the word, to the instantaneous transition from one sphere of psychic life to another, and only afterward, in recollection — that is, in the course of their transposition into daytime consciousness — unfold into the temporal sequence of our visible world, while in themselves possessing a distinct measure of time, a "transcendental" one incomparable to that of the waking day: this interpretation is in all likelihood correct. Let us briefly recall the evidence for this.

"Little sleep, but much was seen" — such is the compressed formula for this density of dream images. Everyone knows that in a brief span of time, as measured externally by an outside observer, one can live through hours, months, even years in sleep, and under certain special circumstances centuries and millennia. In this sense no one doubts that the sleeper, closing himself off from the external visible world and passing in consciousness into another system, acquires a new measure of time as well, by virtue of which his time, compared with the time of the system he has left behind, flows with incredible swiftness. But if everyone agrees — even without knowing the principle of relativity — that in different systems, at least with respect to the case under consideration, time flows according to its own rate and its own measure, not everyone, and perhaps very few, have reflected on the possibility of time flowing with infinite swiftness and even, turning inside out through itself, reversing the direction of its flow after passing through infinite speed. And yet time can in fact be instantaneous and directed from future to past, from effects to causes — teleological — and this occurs precisely when our life passes from the visible into the invisible, from the real into the imaginary. The first step in this direction, that is, the discovery of instantaneous time, was taken by Baron Karl du Prel, then still a very young man, and this step was the most significant of all those he took. But his failure to understand imaginary quantities instilled in him a timidity before the further and more essential discovery that undoubtedly lay along his path — the recognition of reversed time.

The argument can be sketched out roughly as follows. Dreams occasioned by some external cause — or, more precisely, arising on the occasion of one or another external circumstance — are well known to everyone and are undoubtedly numerous in each person's life, though they have not been thought through in the sense that concerns us here. Such a cause may be some noise or sound, a word spoken aloud, a blanket that has slipped off, a smell that suddenly reaches one, a ray of light that falls upon the eyes, and so on and so forth — it is difficult to say what cannot serve as the impulse that sets the creative imagination's unfolding activity in motion. It would perhaps not be hasty to recognize all dreams as being of this origin, though this in no way undermines their objective significance. Yet very rarely is this commonplace acknowledgment of some external circumstance as the occasion for a dream set alongside the actual composition of the dream that arose in the given case. Most likely, this inattentiveness to the content of dreams is fed by the established view of dreams as something empty, unworthy of analysis or thought. Be that as it may, the composition of dreams arising "on occasion" — and I would venture to say of all dreams in general, or at least the majority of them — is built according to the following scheme.

The dreaming imagination presents us with a series of persons, places, and events that link together in a purposeful manner — not, of course, in the sense of any deep meaningfulness governing the action of the dream-drama, but in the sense of pragmatic sequence: we are clearly aware of the connection leading from certain causes, from events-as-causes seen in the dream, to certain effects, to events-as-effects within the dream. Individual events, however absurd they may appear, are nonetheless bound together in the dream by causal connections, and the dream unfolds, pressing toward a definite end, and in a manner that seems — from the dreamer's point of view — fateful, inevitably fateful, arriving at some concluding event that serves as the denouement and culmination of the entire system of successive causes and effects. The dream concludes with event x, which occurred because event t had occurred before it, and t occurred because event s had preceded it, and s had its own cause r before it, and so on and so forth, ascending from effects to causes, from the subsequent to the prior, from the present to the past, all the way back to some initial and ordinarily quite insignificant, wholly unremarkable event a — the cause of everything that follows it, as this is apprehended within the dream. But we must remember that the cause from without, as observed by waking consciousness, of the entire dream as a whole, as a complete composition, was some event or circumstance external to the closed system of the sleeping person. Let us call it Ω.

Now the sleeper awakens, prompted not only by this cause Ω toward the dream he has been having, but actually roused by it; and yet the denouement of the dream, x, coincides — or nearly coincides — in its content with the waking cause of the dream, Ω. This coincidence is ordinarily so precise that it would never occur to one to doubt the directness of the connection between the event x and the cause Ω: the denouement of the dream is unquestionably a dreaming paraphrase of some event in the external world, Ω, which has broken into the sleeper's world, sealed off as it is from everything external. If I am having a dream in which a shot is fired, and in the room beside me a shot has actually been fired or a door has slammed, can there be any doubt that such a dream is not accidental? Why, of course — the shot in the dream is a spiritual echo of the shot in the external world. If one likes, both shots are a twofold perception — by the sleeping ear and by the waking ear — of one and the same physical event. Or if in a dream I see a multitude of fragrant flowers, while in fact a bottle of perfume has been held to my nose, it would again be unnatural to suppose the coincidence of the two scents accidental: the scent in the dream — of flowers — and the scent perceived externally — of perfume. If in a dream someone has thrown himself upon my chest and begun to suffocate me, and when I wake in fright this figure turns out to be, let us say, a pillow that has fallen onto my chest; or if a dog has bitten me in a dream, and upon waking from the sensation of that bite I discover that I have in fact been stung by an insect that flew in through an open window — then here too, and in a countless multitude of similar cases, the coincidence of the denouement x with the cause of the dream Ω is by no means accidental.

We repeat: one and the same real event is perceived by two modes of consciousness — in waking consciousness as Ω, and in sleeping consciousness as x. At first glance there appears to be nothing remarkable in all of this; and indeed there would not be, were it not for the fact that the event x, while being a consequence of Ω — that is, while belonging to the chain of waking, external causality — participates at the same time in another causal series: the causality of sleeping consciousness. In this series x is likewise a consequence, but of an entirely different cause — indeed, of a whole chain of causes and effects descending in a tightly forged sequence to some initial cause a. Yet a manifestly has nothing in common, in its content, with the cause Ω, and consequently could not have been produced by it. And had there been no a, together with all the consequences flowing from it, there would have been no dream at all — that is, there could have been no denouement x — that is, we would not have awakened, and consequently the external cause Ω would never have reached our consciousness. It is therefore beyond doubt: x is the reflection, by the dreaming imagination, of the phenomenon Ω; but x is not a deus ex machina intruding without any meaning, in defiance of the logic and course of events within the dream, upon its inner images and severing them senselessly. Rather, x genuinely constitutes the denouement of a certain dramatic action. What happens with the dream is entirely unlike what those who have no sense of Providence imagine life to be — where a train wreck or a shot fired from around a corner cuts short an unfolding and promising career — but is precisely like what occurs in a masterful drama, in which the end arrives because all the events that prepared it have ripened, and it would be a violation of the meaning and integrity of the whole drama if the denouement had not come. In no way, given the exceedingly strong pragmatic coherence among all the events of the dream, can we regard the denouement x as an independent event glued on from outside to the series of other events and, by some incomprehensible coincidence, leaving undisturbed the inner logic and artistic truth of the dream in all its details. There is no doubt that dreams of the type under examination are integral, self-enclosed unities, in which the end — the denouement — is anticipated from the very beginning and, moreover, itself determines both the beginning as the opening situation and the whole. And taking into account the relative insignificance of the opening situation in itself, apart from the consequences that complete it — as is generally the case in a tightly constructed drama — we have every right to affirm the teleological character of the entire composition of the dream: all its events unfold in view of the denouement, so that the denouement may not hang in the air, may not be an unhappy accident, but may possess a deep pragmatic motivation.