I suppose I must have fallen asleep; I hope so, but I fear, for all that followed was startlingly real – so real that now sitting here in the broad, full sunlight of the morning, I cannot in the least believe that it was all sleep.

16 May diary entry by Jonathan Harker in Bram Stocker’s Dracula (1897)

The Twilight Chamber

On the night of 7 March 1890, Bram Stocker had a bad dream and jotted down on some notepaper ‘Young man goes out – sees girls – one tries to kiss him not on lips but throat – Old Count interferes – rage & fury diabolical – This man belongs to me – I want him.’ Later, Stocker apparently told his son Noel that such nightmares had been the source of Dracula and one found itself relived in fictional form in the diary entry of Jonathan Harker.

In The Step E.F. Benson writes about that ‘twilight chamber’ of the brain that is ‘half-way between waking and sleeping.’ It’s a place writers know well, for they are often dependant on it for their stories. Stephen King in his forword to his short story collection Night Shift says that the horror writer is at his best when not quite asleep and not quite awake, when dreams seems real and reality is more like a dream. He talks as well about that world between the conscious and sub-conscious, where allegory and images most naturally occur. And for Stephen King horror stories, what he calls his ‘fearsomes’, are packed, like dreams, with fantasy visions that connect and resonate with our deep anxieties and perplexing paranoias.

It’s in dreams that ghosts so often make themselves known and a classic example is the E.F. Benson story The Face. Dreaming is a motif that runs through many E.F. Benson tales, where they often become real or act as a warning. Think here of The Room in the Tower, The Other Bed, The Bus-Conductor (one of the stories in the classic Ealing film Dead of Night) and Pirates – “I have dreamed this before, and then I woke and found myself elderly and alone again, but this time it is real!”.

The idea of something dreamed becoming real is also there in The Mysterious Sketch by Emile Erckmann (1822-1899) and Alexandre Chatrian (1826-1890), where a painter awakes at one o’clock in the morning and immediately starts drawing a court-yard, only it turns out to be a place where a real murder took place and when the sketch is seen by the authorities the artist is arrested. He tries to explain that the image came from a dream, but it is only when he draws the murderer he saw at the scene on his cell wall that the real killer is identified and the psychic sketcher is saved.

Then there’s that oft told tale of a person who dreams of a close relative, only to receive a message the next day informing them that the loved one has died. Such a scenario features in Perceval Landon’s Thurnley Abbey and Henry James’ The Way It Came, published in 1896 but which he renamed The Friends of the Friends in 1909 as he thought the original title a little colourless.

Yakumo Koizumi (1850 – 1904), born Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, suggested that the fear of ghosts, as well as our belief in them, had its origins in dreams. He says in Nightmare-Touch, ‘It is a peculiar fear. No other fear is so intense; yet none is so vague.’ And perhaps it’s the vagueness of dreams which allows them to be the catch-all explanation when someone claims to see a ghost, as when Mrs Marjorum says to Sarah in At Chrighton Abbey, “You’ve dropped off in your chair before the fire, and had a dream, that’s it.”

But why shouldn’t a ghost in a dream be real? Shakespeare’s ghosts came in dreams, but that wouldn’t have stopped his audience from believing that they were true. Julius Caesar haunted Brutus in a dream and so did all those ghosts who disturb the sleep, but not ultimately the conscience, of the murderous Richard the Third.