The Nighttime madness of “Finnegans Wake”

Given that we spend some one third or so of our lives asleep, it may seem incongruous that writers of fiction devote so little time to exploring our sleeping states. Incongruous, perhaps, but not surprising. For one thing, while we know that we do dream, we very often cannot remember what we dream about: at best, we remember – and even then, partially – only what we were dreaming about immediately before waking; more often, our remembrance slips away from our grasp within moments of our daytime consciousness assuming control, and all that remain, if anything, are the feelings and emotions our dream had evoked rather than the dream itself. And even if we do remember our dream, we don’t know what to make of them – weird jumbles that they are of our current concerns, our memories (both those still fresh in the mind and those long buried), our hopes and, more frequently (for me at any rate) our fears, all mixed up with fragments and pieces and bits and bobs we have picked up from books, from newspapers, from television, from conversation, etc. – all that detritus floating rather pointlessly upon the disordered surfaces of our minds. None of this seems sufficiently malleable into a formal coherence that is, whether we like it or not, a requirement of art.

This hasn’t, of course, prevented writers from attempting to enter the world of dreams. In ancient literatures, dreams were things that came into our mind from the world outside, usually from divinities warning us of what is yet to come; often, they required skilled interpreters – a Joseph or a Daniel – to extricate their true meaning. Later, a dream was seen not so much as an intrusion from an outside world, but as a fantasia played out with material that is already within the dreamer’s mind: in that astonishing passage in Richard III in which Clarence narrates his dream, for instance, Shakespeare presents not a divine foretelling, but the writhings of a guilt-tormented mind.

Later still, writers and thinkers – especially those fascinated by the essential irrationality of human mind, e.g. Poe, Dostoyevsky, Strindberg – attempted to understand this strange phenomenon better. Famously, Freud attempted to formulate systematically what our dreams mean. But even then, in fiction, at any rate, dreams played, at best, a peripheral part: they were too vague, too intangible, too formless and too indifferent to artistic and to thematic unities, to be incorporated satisfactorily into something that demands formal coherence. It was like trying to sculpt with water.

And this, I think, is the challenge Joyce set himself in Finnegans Wake. Having depicted in Ulysses the daytime consciousness, as well as the daytime unconsciousness, of the waking mind, could he now turn his attention to the profound mysteries of the mind in its sleeping state? Not, as had been done already, as episodes in an otherwise daytime narrative, but as the very substance of the work? Could the work itself be a presentation of a dream miraculously remembered, with all its irrationalities, all its indifference to the unity or even to the consistency of time and of space, both of which are, effectively, banished? Could he dispense even with characters? And what about thematic unity, or structure? Are these things too, to vanish?

The answers to all these questions aren’t unambiguously “yes”:  in some cases, it’s unambiguously “no”. Characters cannot be dispensed with: without characters, there can be no narration, and, hence, no fiction. But in a dream narration such as this, characters may merge one into another; they may change identity; they may split themselves into different characters, and reassemble, possibly into something different. Time, too, cannot be dispensed with entirely: the children’s games in Part Two certainly break out of their ostensible timeframe, but the children’s lessons follow these games in time. And neither can space be banished completely: in Book Three Shaun disappears, but turns up as Jaun in another place; and later, Jaun too disappears, an turns up as Yawn, again, in another place.  The longest chapter is set in a bar, and, despite various episodes that seem to take us out, we remain quite firmly, I think, within it. Character and time and space may all be fluid, but the concepts cannot completely be dispensed with.

And, Joyce decided early on, structure most certainly could not be dispensed with either. The book may often seem like random meanderings, but it isn’t: unlike our real dreams, Finnegans Wake, like Ulysses, is very intricately structured. The point was not to create a work that was merely random meanderings, as dreams are, but, rather, to give an impression of formlessness: this impression of formlessness is important since our dreams themselves are formless, but structure is important also because Finnegans Wake is also a work of art, and art cannot exist without structure.

For Ulysses, Joyce had famously turned to Homer’s Odyssey for his structure, but that sort of linear narrative structure building towards a cathartic climax would not have worked here: dreams are not oriented towards any particular end. So he turned instead to the writings of the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, who had proposed (so I’m told: I don’t pretend to have read his work) instead of a linear view of history, a cyclical view. To begin with, according to Vico, we have a theocratic age, where humans are ruled by the divine, whose essence is seen on earth in the forms of giants and heroes, and whose word is brought down to us by visionaries and prophets; then, the religious element starts to vanish, and we have an aristocratic age, where we are ruled by an elite that does not necessarily seek the sanction of divine will; then follows the democratic age, but with such multiplicity of voices each striving for attention, a certain sense of an overriding purpose is lost, a certain debasement is apparent, and things fall apart; and, at this point, according to Vico, we have the ricoroso – the return again to divinities, and the theocratic age, and the whole cycle begins all over again. Whether Joyce accepted such a view of history doesn’t really matter (I rather suspect he didn’t): the point was that this gave him the sort of cyclical structure he had been looking for. For Finnegans Wake isn’t end-oriented: it starts in mid-sentence with the run of a river, and ends in mid-sentence, in the middle of a majestic passage describing the river flowing into the sea. But the river flowing into the sea in not the end: for the clouds that form above the sea drift back landwards, and the entire cycle starts all over again. The river continues to flow. The unfinished sentence at the end is completed by the unstarted sentence at the beginning, so, once one has reached the end, one can (in, theory, at least: I’d be surprised indeed if anyone has actually done this in practice) turn right back to the beginning and read the book all over again.

This cyclical view of time fits well with one of the major themes of the book – the succession of human generations, with each new generation superseding and supplanting the previous, and yet, somehow, mirroring the previous. Not in exact terms, of course: but the journey from youth to middle age to old age and finally to death is the common lot of us all, whatever generation we may be part of; for all of us, whatever visionary gleam we may have to begin with fades into the light of common day, and we repeat, in somewhat different forms, no doubt, the patterns that had gone before – as if our whole vocation were endless imitation.

But it is not perfect imitation. In each of the stages of the Viconian cycle, there has been a decline, of sorts, from the previous stage. The aristocracy could not compare with gods in terms of stature, and neither can democracy, the Age of the People, undirected and pulling simultaneously in all directions, compare with the aristocracy. Such a schema makes little sense, of course, as political analysis, but in structural terms, it suits Joyce’s purpose: there are three stages, each forming a major part of the book, and each marking a decline in terms of stature, of “bigness”, from what had previously been, until a short last chapter, the ricorso, takes us back to where we had started.

So far, I have been discussing all of this in the language of daytime – our waking language. And, for the purposes of this post, I shall continue to do so. But this language is inadequate for Joyce’s purpose, for this waking daytime language has built into it a logic that serves us for our daytime activities, but is quite unsuitable for the night-time state that Joyce is representing – a dream that will not, by its very nature, admit any kind of waking daytime logic. So Joyce took the most radical (and still deeply controversial) step of creating his own language. The result, according to many, is simply gibberish. Well, yes: dreams are simply gibberish as well, if it comes to that. But one cannot read hundreds of pages of mere gibberish: at some level, it has to make at least some sort of sense.

The language Joyce created for himself is multilingual. Being himself an accomplished linguist, he took elements not merely of English, but of various languages from across Europe, from the Middle East, from India (though he appears not to have ventured into the languages of Africa, the Far East, or of the Americas), and combined them together to create what often seem to be nonsense words, but which, looked more closely, reveal a multitude of different meanings. This allows him to say multiple things at the same time, and also – and this, I think, is important – to hide meaning. For dreams are obscure: from the Prophet Joseph to Sigmund Freud, we have felt the need to interpret dreams, because they do not, can not, by their very nature, give up their secrets openly. To criticise the book for its obscurity is to miss the point. A dream that is not obscure is no longer a dream.

And it is not just the multilingual aspects that create the obscurity. Embedded into the prose are references to all sort of things – from learned exegeses of the Book of Kells, to ballads, to popular music hall songs, to philosophical and theological concepts, to historic events and personages, to mythology and to folklore – all the various fragments and pieces and bits and bobs that Joyce had floating on the surface of, or stored in the depths of, his own prodigiously capacious mind.

All very well, but were does this leave the reader? Especially those readers without Joyce’s linguistic abilities, and without his massive erudition? True, there are available now many fine guides to this book – guides without which, frankly, I’d have floundered quite hopelessly. Roland McHugh’s Annotations to Finnegans Wake breaks down the multi-lingual vocabulary of the various compound and portmanteau words line by line with an extraordinary and exacting thoroughness, while A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson gives us a fine picture not so much of the individual details, perhaps, but of the narrative flow. Neither should one overlook Anthony Burgess’ splendid writings on this book that, throughout his literary career, he had exalted and had encouraged us all at least to try. But even with all this help, there are passages – often long passages – that seemed to me to make little sense, and where, despite my best intentions, I was most certainly tempted to regard merely as “gibberish”, and to give up. This, I think, is where we need to open our ears. For Finnegans Wake is, perhaps above all, a very musical book. We need to sound the words to our inner ear, pick out the various assonances and dissonances, the various internal rhymes and metres and rhythms. And it is quite astonishing how much these sounds and sonorities and rhythms convey when the meanings of the words themselves remain unclear. And if it still seems obscure – well, it is, after all, a dream.

But whose dream? Ostensibly, it is the dream of a publican in the Chapelizod area of Dublin, probably named (as we discover towards the end), Porter. But it can’t be: if the material of a dream cannot be other than what is already contained within the head of the dreamer, it is quite inconceivable that this Mr. Porter could carry around in his head such vast multi-lingual and multi-cultural erudition. Furthermore, towards the end of the book, Mr. Porter wakes up, but the language does not wake up with him: it remains the dream language that Joyce had invented. So, most likely, this is Joyce’s own dream. Perhaps. But I think Joyce’s ambition was aiming higher. If this is anyone’s dream at all, it is the collective dream of everyone, of the whole of mankind. Here Comes Everybody.

Although this may sound megalomaniac on Joyce’s part, it is not, I think, fanciful on ours. Joyce’s intention was, indeed, to write a work that would encompass the whole of mankind. But no-one, not even Joyce, could write a novel whose dramatis personae includes all humans. What he did instead was to focus on a small group of people, a family, and let each member of this family take on a multiplicity of roles. This is a dream, after all, and identities need not be fixed.

There is the father, a publican in the Chapelizod area of Dublin. His daytime name is, probably, Porter, but his night-time dream name is the simultaneously grandiose and somewhat absurd Humphrey Chimpden Earwhicker. Humphrey because he is also Humpty Dumpty, who has a great fall (and who, in Through the Looking Glass, introduces the concept of the “portmanteau word” – one word that is the composite of many others, and takes on all their meanings); Chimpden because … well, I’m not quite sure to be honest; and Earwhicker because among other things, it suggests an “earwig”: we’ll come to the significance of that later. His wife too has a rather wonderful dream name – Anna Livia Plurabelle: Livia because she is, among other things, the River Liffey that runs through Dublin (and, by extension, she is all the rivers in all the world); Plurabelle because she is beautiful in a plurality of ways. Throughout this narrative are embedded the initials HCE and ALP in all their various forms. HCE we encounter right at the end of the first paragraph: Howth Castle and Environs. He is also Haveth Childers Everywhere; he is also Here Comes Everybody. He is the eternal father figure of us all, and also the eternal everyman. If it seems rather fanciful to elevate an ordinary Dublin publican to such grandiose heights, it is, perhaps, no more so than elevating an advertising canvasser to be the great Ulysses himself. And after all, this is a dream: anything is possible.

 ALP will make her presence felt later. Just as her husband is present somewhere nearby when HCE crops up, so is she present every time we encounter ALP. There are such leitmotifs scattered throughout the text, in a rare attempt, perhaps, on Joyce’s part to guide us through this nighttime maze.

They have three children – twin boys Jerry and Kevin, and a daughter, Isobel. Jerry and Kevin appear throughout in various forms – most often as Shaun the Post, and Shem the Penman. Both are, in their different ways, incomplete (and hence, inferior) epigones of their father. Shem is the writer: in the chapter describing him, Joyce gives us what is in effect a witty self-portrait. He also presents Shem in the most unflattering, even scurrilous of terms:

Shem’s bodily getup, it seems, included an adze of a skull, an eight of a larkseye, the whoel of a nose, one numb arm up a sleeve, fortytwo hairs off his uncrown, eighteen to his mock lip, a trio of barbels from his megageg chin (sowman’s son), the wrong shoulder higher than the right, all ears, an artificial tongue with a natural curl, not a foot to stand on, a handful of thumbs, a blind stomach, a deaf heart, a loose liver, two fifths of two buttocks …

And so on. Shem the Penman may be Joyce himself, the writer of the book we are reading, but he is not the book’s hero. (Later, we shall see him bear false witness against his brother Shaun, who has been accused of his father’s crime.)

Neither is Shaun the hero. He is the Post – not someone who can wield the pen, but who can deliver what has been written. He is the extrovert – the captain-of-the-school-team type, a ladies’ man, much beloved by the girls (who revile Shem). Shaun and Shem appear throughout as opposites – as opposites, furthermore, at war with each other. A picture on the wall of the Porters’ house depicts the Archangel Michael defeating Lucifer: this is the cue needed to transform Shaun and Shem into the Archangel and the Devil – into Mick and Nick (Shaun being the splendiferous archangel, of course, and Shem the Devil). They re-appear as Burrus and Caseous (butter and cheese) – both in love with Margareen; as the Mookse and the Gripes, in a fable that, among other things, rehearses the incorporation of the Irish Church into the wider Church of Rome; as the Ondt and the Gracehoper, in a charming parody of Aesop’s fable (“Ondt” is the Norwegin for evil – obviously!); and so on.

In all these presentations of fraternal warfare, of battles between the opposites, another Italian philosopher is invoked: Giordano Bruno, who spoke of opposites being eventually reconciled to form a greater whole. Bruno was born in Nola, in southern Italy, and Bruno the Nolan becomes transformed quite easily into Brown and Nolan, a firm of Dublin publishers and booksellers. Brown and Nolan appear in various forms throughout the text as a leitmotif referring to brotherly hate, of warring opposites awaiting eventual reconciliation to become whole again.

And there’s Isobel, the daughter. Sometimes – for, once again, this is a dream – she becomes split into two: her own sweet self, and her mirror image, a nubile temptress. She is the twenty-ninth of the “calendar girls” (numbers play an important role in this book). There are twenty eight other girls, each representing one day of a month in the calendar (presumably this dream is taking place on a February night), with Isobel herself appearing as the twenty-ninth, the leap year girl. It’s these twenty nine who enthusiastically cheer on Mick in his battles against Nick, and revile Nick in his defeat. It’s these same twenty-nine girls to whom Shaun (in the guise of a debased Christ figure Jaun) later delivers seemingly pious but deeply cynical homilies, declaring them to be his Church.

Isobel is also Iseult of Celtic myth, or Isolde, as she appears in Wagner’s opera. (And we must remember that this dream is being dreamt in Chapelizod – the Chapel of Iseult.) In the myth, there are actually two Iseults – the one with whom Tristram (Tristan in Wagner’s opera) falls in love, and Iseult-la-Belle, whom Tristram later marries. So it is only reasonable – insofar as reason has any place here – that Isobel should also split herself into two – her own self, and her mirror image. In her form as temptress, she tempts, rather disturbingly, her brother Shaun, and also, equally disturbingly, her father, HCE himself. HCE – or Mr Porter, or what you will – is getting on in years, losing his sexual prowess; his wife, too, now in middle age, is not the beauty she had once been (though, being Plurabelle, she has other kinds of beauty too). It is not surprising that HCE, in one last throw of the dice, as it were, should be, at least, tempted by younger women – if only subconsciously. But in this book, where all the characters are effectively played by members of one family, the young woman to tempt HCE can only be his own nubile daughter. This incestuous desire is too terrible to be spoken out loud, even in a dream: so “incest” appears (and reappears) in disguise, as “insect”. Earwhicker comes in the form of an earwig. When rumours about HCE’s sexual misdemeanours spread across the city, a scurrilous ballad appears (Joyce gives us both text and music) – “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly”. And we all know that perce-oreille is French for “earwig”. Of course we do.

HCE certainly falls, but he wasn’t the first. For, before the aristocratic age, we had, according to the Viconian schema, the theocratic age – and we have here the fall of Finnegan. The Finnegan here is mythic: he is Finn McCool, he is Brian Boru – the great giants and leaders in Irish history and folklore. But equally, he is also an ordinary builder in the popular ballad “Finnegan’s Wake” (the apostrophe in the title of the ballad implying possession, just as the lack of that apostrophe in the title of the novel implies plurality). According to this ballad, this Finnegan falls off his ladder while at work, is thought dead, but comes back to life at his own wake on hearing the word “whiskey”. Joyce describes his fall,

… with larrons o’toolers clittering up and tombles a’buckets clottering down.

(Already we are looking forward to the tale of the Mookse and the Gripes, with Bishop Laurence O’Toole of the Irish Church in the ascendency, and his contemporary Bishop Thomas à Beckett in decline.)

This Finnegan, when introduced, is referred to as “Bygmester Finnegan of the Stuttering Hand”. The “Bygmester” is a reference to Ibsen’s The Master Builder, or, in the original, Bygmester Solness – a work that plays an important thematic role in this novel. Master Builder Solness, or Bygmester Solness, fears being supplanted by the next generation; and towards the end of the drama, at the urging of a temptress far younger than himself and to whom he is clearly attracted, he climbs up his own tower, despite his fear of heights; and, from the top, he challenges the God he has rejected, but whom he still dare not even name, before falling to his death. Both the attraction to a younger woman implied by the reference to Ibsen’s play, and the stutter implied by “Stutterer’s Hand”, are associated in the rest of the novel not with the original Finnegan, but with his successor HCE. But we mustn’t expect consistency of character in a dream: Finnegan has about him elements, at least, of HCE. We shouldn’t be too surprised to see HCE peep out from the mythical Finnegan, nor, later, appear to speak through his sons. HCE is all men, anyway: Here Comes Everybody.

Finnegan dies, but is resurrected. This sets the pattern for the whole book: first the fall, and then the rise, generation after generation. We are born, we die, but then the cycle then starts all over again: we start again only to fin again. HCE falls too, and his fall, significantly, is in Phoenix Park in Dublin (the phoenix, of course, being the mythical bird that rises from its own ashes). But … “O phoenix culprit!” (“O Felix Culpa,” said St Augustine regarding Man’s first fall – “Oh happy crime!”)  

The exact nature of HCE’s fall isn’t clear. We are told he had “behaved with ongentilmensky immodus opposite a pair of dainty maidservants”. The “pair of dainty maidservants” are, of course, played by his own daughter Isobel and her mirror image. It is witnessed also by three soldiers. What this “ongentilmensky immodus” is, we cannot be sure, but rumours begin to spread. HCE protests his innocence, but his guilt – for whatever it was – makes him stutter. In his advancing middle age, he has been attracted by nubile young females: whether or not he had acted on this attraction is, for the purposes of this novel, immaterial. He is “insectuous”. The scurrilous ballad that circulates about him is “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” – perce-oreille, earwig. 

Of course, HCE is hardly the first middle-aged man to have been attracted to younger women. There is Master Builder Solness in Ibsen’s play. There is King Mark in Celtic legend, who loved his young wife Iseult, but who was betrayed by the younger Tristram. (Or, rather, Marke, Isolde and Tristan, as named in Wagner’s opera.) There’s Jonathan Swift, who, in his advancing years, exchanged many letters with two young ladies, both called Esther – Esther Johnson (referred to in Swift’s correspondence as Stella) and Esther Vanhomrigh (referred to as Vanessa). Again – two ladies, two ghostly twins, with the same name. And there’s Charles Stuart Parnell, the Irish politician whose career ended after his adulterous relationship with Kitty O’Shea became known. References to all of these (and more) are littered throughout the text of Finnegans Wake, sometimes in the most obscure of forms. (In one brief chapter, HCE actually dreams that he is King Mark.) And they point to the same thing: HCE’s guilt. He protests his innocence, but he cannot hide his guilty stutter, his hesitancy while speaking.

And his hesitancy too becomes a recurring theme. When a journalist Piggott had tried to destroy Parnell’s reputation with a forgery, he had mis-spelled the word “hesitancy” – an error a man such as Parnell would never have made. And this becomes a sort of running gag, as various mis-spellings of the word “hesitancy” punctuate the narrative of Finnegans Wake, acting as yet another leitmotif of HCE’s guilt.

The guilt may have been no more than desire, maybe even unconscious desire, rather than action: we cannot tell. But the stories and rumours swell to gigantic proportions, and HCE is tried, found guilty, and buried under Lough Neagh (or under “lough and neagh”). But yet, like his forebear Finnegan, he rises – begin again to fin again.

But there is one who stands by him: his wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle, the Liffey, the flowing River upon which her husband builds the city.

In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilitis, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!

As HCE is everyman, ALP is everywoman: as the twin sons Shem and Shaun are contained in HCE, so Isobel is contained in ALP. So is Kate, the cleaning woman at the pub, who also appears throughout the novel in various forms. But whatever form she appears in, she is, underneath it all, ALP. She is the river that is ever-changing – we never step into the same river twice, after all – but ever the same nonetheless. Even her final departure into the sea is but a beginning. She protects and nurtures her children, and defends the injured reputation of her husband. When the scandal breaks about his head and he is tried and condemned, ALP writes a letter in her husband’s defence. At least, she composes it: it is her son Shem the Penman who pens it. This letter is lost, but a hen digs it up from under a heap of dirt. When examined, it seems curiously to have transformed itself into the Book of Kells (there follows at this point a pseudo-scholarly exegesis of that work). We only get to see the letter at the very end of the book, as the river flows majestically into the sea: just as Ulysses had ended with Molly Bloom’s triumphant monologue in which she declares Bloom’s victory over his rivals, so this ends with another triumphant monologue, justifying a much-maligned and guilt-ridden humanity. Except, of course, this isn’t the end.

There are other motifs too running throughout the book, each seemingly transformed from the Porters’ daily life. The twelve customers in the pub become transformed into twelve jurymen, trying HCE on the charge, presumably, of “ongentilmensky immodus”. Or they become the twelve months of the calendar hanging on the wall.  Or the twelve disciples. There are four others, who sometimes become the four evangelists. Or, sometimes, the four provinces of Ireland. They are revealed towards the end – when the mists lift slightly – to be the four bedposts of the Porters’ bed. But nothing can keep its shape for long here. In ever-changing patterns, they collide with each other, are transformed, and return, inescapably, in new shapes and new colours. The book itself Joyce describes at one point as a “colliderscape”.

What, in the end, is one to make of all these mountains of myth, of all this madness? There seems little point in claiming it may be read like any other novel. But poring over every word and trying to tease out its meaning gives little sense of its flow. Is it worth it? I guess the answer, for me at least, must be “yes” since I did, after all, spend over a year making my way through it. I was, of course, puzzled a lot. But I also laughed a lot: it is a mistake, I think, to approach Joyce with a furrowed brow when, all too often, a good-natured laugh is more appropriate. It is also often deeply poetic, with its nonsense words and nonsense worlds creating what may without overstatement be described as a sense of exaltation. And nowhere more so, perhaps, than in the final chapter of the First Part, where two washerwomen, on either side of the River Liffey speak in homely, everyday terms about the woman who is also the river they are washing their clothes in. And of her husband, the builder of cities, who built his city upon this river. And of their children, the “daughtersons”, redeemed by their Plurabelle mother from their Earwig father’s guilt. As the river approaches the sea, it becomes wider, and the washerwomen, one on either bank, can no longer hear each other:

Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us. My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia’s daughtersons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem or Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night, night! Telmetale of stem and stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitheringandthithering waters of. Night!

Previously, at the end of the episode of the Mookse and the Gripes, Shem had turned into a tree, and Shem into a rock – one living and forever growing, though transient; and the other inanimate, but permanent. The washerwomen seem to reflect on this – Shem and Shaun, stem and stone. The Art and the Law, if one likes. Two opposites longing to be one, to become a greater whole. Time itself seems here to stand still, and we seem to be granted a glimpse into some other mode of existence. The mode of a dream, perhaps.