1988. However, my plan to begin with this strange episode changed when in January 1989 I experienced for the first time, in all the records which I have kept of this private world for more than twenty years, happiness. Great names are a commonplace in this World of My Own, but real meaningless and inexplicable happiness—this is the only experience of it I have recorded.
It has often been suggested that opium helps to open the closed door of this World, but I have no evidence for this. In the fifties, when I was smoking opium in Vietnam and Malaya, I was busy keeping a diary of violent events in the Common World, but I have in my memory only one remarkable happening in the World of My Own, remarkable because it goes so far back in time—in fact to the year 1 AD .
I was living then not far from Bethlehem, and Idecided to walk down to that small town to visit a brothel I knew there, carrying a gold coin with which to pay the girl whom I would choose. At the approach to the town I saw a strange sight: a group of men in Eastern clothes who were bowing and offering gifts. To what? To a blank wall. There was no one there to receive their gifts or return their salutation. I stood quite a while watching this curious scene and then something—I don’t know what—impelled me to throw my gold coin at the wall and turn away.
Time in the World of One’s Own can move slowly or it can move very rapidly. In this case the centuries passed by me like a flash and I found myself lying on my bed reading in the New Testament a story of how some Eastern kings came to a stable in Bethlehem, and I realized that this was what I had seen. My first thought was: ‘Well, I went to Bethlehem to give that gold coin to a woman and it seems that I did in fact give it to a woman, even though all I saw was a blank wall.’
There is an imaginative side to the World of One’s Own quite distinct from that of the Common World. Robert Louis Stevenson told an interviewer about the strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: ‘On one occasion I was very hard up for money and I felt I had to do something. I thought and thought, and tried hard to find a subject to write about. At nightI dreamt the story, it practically came to me as a gift, and what makes it appear more odd is that I was quite in the habit of dreaming stories. Thus, not long ago, I dreamt the story of “Olalla”, and I have at the present moment two unwritten stories I likewise dreamt.’
‘Olalla’ is an unfairly neglected story of Stevenson’s and in it there is a kind of underground resemblance to Dr Jekyll. It is a story which belongs quite definitely to the World of His Own rather than to Spain, where the scene is supposed to be set, just as in Dr Jekyll’s London we seem to be moving in the streets of Edinburgh or the streets of a city in Stevenson’s own private world.
The strange thing is that the author, when he is in the Common World, feels a stranger in the World of His Own, and Stevenson was lost and puzzled by his own story. He wrote a letter: ‘The trouble with “Olalla” is that it somehow sounds false … the odd problem is: what makes a story true? “Markheim” is true; “Olalla” false, and I don’t know why.’ He even went so far, in the case of Dr Jekyll, as to throw the first draft into the fire.
A few of my short stories have been drawn from memories of the World of My Own. In ‘Dream of a Strange Land’ I recorded my experience in that World when I was a leper seeking treatment in Sweden.Only the sound of a shot with which the printed tale ends has been added. In another story, ‘The Root of All Evil’, laid in Germany far back in the nineteenth century, I changed nothing after I woke, with a smile of amusement, from My Own World to the Common World.
There is another side to what we call dreams, very interestingly exposed in J.W. Dunne’s
Experiment with Time
. They contain scraps of the future as well as of the past. I have already written of how
It has often been suggested that opium helps to open the closed door of this World, but I have no evidence for this. In the fifties, when I was smoking opium in Vietnam and Malaya, I was busy keeping a diary of violent events in the Common World, but I have in my memory only one remarkable happening in the World of My Own, remarkable because it goes so far back in time—in fact to the year 1 AD .
I was living then not far from Bethlehem, and Idecided to walk down to that small town to visit a brothel I knew there, carrying a gold coin with which to pay the girl whom I would choose. At the approach to the town I saw a strange sight: a group of men in Eastern clothes who were bowing and offering gifts. To what? To a blank wall. There was no one there to receive their gifts or return their salutation. I stood quite a while watching this curious scene and then something—I don’t know what—impelled me to throw my gold coin at the wall and turn away.
Time in the World of One’s Own can move slowly or it can move very rapidly. In this case the centuries passed by me like a flash and I found myself lying on my bed reading in the New Testament a story of how some Eastern kings came to a stable in Bethlehem, and I realized that this was what I had seen. My first thought was: ‘Well, I went to Bethlehem to give that gold coin to a woman and it seems that I did in fact give it to a woman, even though all I saw was a blank wall.’
There is an imaginative side to the World of One’s Own quite distinct from that of the Common World. Robert Louis Stevenson told an interviewer about the strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: ‘On one occasion I was very hard up for money and I felt I had to do something. I thought and thought, and tried hard to find a subject to write about. At nightI dreamt the story, it practically came to me as a gift, and what makes it appear more odd is that I was quite in the habit of dreaming stories. Thus, not long ago, I dreamt the story of “Olalla”, and I have at the present moment two unwritten stories I likewise dreamt.’
‘Olalla’ is an unfairly neglected story of Stevenson’s and in it there is a kind of underground resemblance to Dr Jekyll. It is a story which belongs quite definitely to the World of His Own rather than to Spain, where the scene is supposed to be set, just as in Dr Jekyll’s London we seem to be moving in the streets of Edinburgh or the streets of a city in Stevenson’s own private world.
The strange thing is that the author, when he is in the Common World, feels a stranger in the World of His Own, and Stevenson was lost and puzzled by his own story. He wrote a letter: ‘The trouble with “Olalla” is that it somehow sounds false … the odd problem is: what makes a story true? “Markheim” is true; “Olalla” false, and I don’t know why.’ He even went so far, in the case of Dr Jekyll, as to throw the first draft into the fire.
A few of my short stories have been drawn from memories of the World of My Own. In ‘Dream of a Strange Land’ I recorded my experience in that World when I was a leper seeking treatment in Sweden.Only the sound of a shot with which the printed tale ends has been added. In another story, ‘The Root of All Evil’, laid in Germany far back in the nineteenth century, I changed nothing after I woke, with a smile of amusement, from My Own World to the Common World.
There is another side to what we call dreams, very interestingly exposed in J.W. Dunne’s
Experiment with Time
. They contain scraps of the future as well as of the past. I have already written of how
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