Nightmare Tales

Worst of all; my consciousness, my “I,” had apparently acquired the phenomenal capacity of trebling, quadrupling, and even of decuplating itself. I lived, felt and suffered, in the same space of time, in half-a-dozen different places at once, passing over various events of my life, at different epochs, and under the most dissimilar circumstances; though predominant over all was my spiritual experience at Kioto. Thus, as in the famous fugue in Don Giovanni, the heart-rending notes of Elvira’s aria of despair ring high above, but interfere in no way with the melody of the minuet, the song of seduction, and the chorus, so I went over and over my travailed woes, the feelings of agony unspeakable at the awful sights of my vision, the repetition of which blunted in no wise even a single pang of my despair and horror; nor did these feelings weaken in the least scenes and events entirely disconnected with the first one, that I was living through again, or interfere in any way the one with the other. It was a maddening experience! A series of contrapuntal, mental phantasmagoria from real life. Here was I, during the same half-a-minute of time, examining with cold curiosity the mangled remains of my sister’s husband; following with the same indifference the effects of the news on her brain, as in my first Kioto vision, and feeling at the same time hell-torture for these very events, as when I returned to consciousness. I was listening to the philosophical discourses of the Bonze, every word of which I heard and understood, and was trying to laugh him to scorn. I was again a child, then a youth, hearing my mother’s and my sweet sister’s voices, admonishing me and teaching duty to all men. I was saving a friend from drowning, and was sneering at his aged father who thanks me for having saved a “soul” yet unprepared to meet his Maker.

“Speak of dual consciousness, you psycho-physiologists!” – I cried, in one of the moments when agony, mental and as it seemed to me physical also, had arrived at a degree of intensity which would have killed a dozen living men; “speak of your psychological and physiological experiments, you schoolmen, puffed up with pride and book-learning! Here am I to give you the lie…” And now I was reading the works and holding converse with learned professors and lecturers, who had led me to my fatal scepticism. And, while arguing the impossibility of consciousness divorced from its brain, I was shedding tears of blood over the supposed fate of my nieces and nephews. More terrible than all: I knew, as only a liberated consciousness can know, that all I had seen in my vision at Japan, and all that I was seeing and hearing over and over again now, was true in every point and detail, that it was a long string of ghastly and terrible, still of real, actual, facts.

For, perhaps, the hundredth time, I had rivetted my attention on the needle of the clock, I had lost the number of my gyrations and was fast coming to the conclusion that they would never stop, that consciousness, is, after all, indestructible, and that this was to be my punishment in Eternity. I was beginning to realize from personal experience how the condemned sinners would feel – “were not eternal damnation a logical and mathematical impossibility in an ever progressing Universe” – I still found the force to argue. Yea, indeed; at this hour of my ever-increasing agony, my consciousness – now my synonym for “I” – had still the power of revolting at certain theological claims, of denying all their propositions, all – save ITSELF… No; I denied the independent nature of my consciousness no longer, for I knew it now to be such. But is it eternal withal? O thou incomprehensible and terrible Reality! But if thou art eternal, who then art thou? – since there is no deity, no God. Whence dost thou come, and when didst thou first appear, if thou art not a part of the cold body lying yonder? And whither dost thou lead me, who am thyself, and shall our thought and fancy have an end? What is thy real name, thou unfathomable Reality, and impenetrable Mystery! Oh, I would fain annihilate thee… “Soul-Vision”! – who speaks of Soul, and whose voice is this?.. It says that I see now for myself, that there is a Soul in man, after all… I deny this. My Soul, my vital Soul, or the Spirit of life, has expired with my body, with the gray matter of my brain. This “I” of mine, this consciousness, is not yet proven to me as eternal. Reincarnation, in which the Bonze felt so anxious I should believe may be true… Why not? Is not the flower born year after year from the same root? Hence this “I” once separated from its brain, losing its balance, and calling forth such a host of visions … before reincarnating…

I was again face to face with the inexorable, fatal clock. And as I was watching its needle, I heard the voice of the Bonze, coming out of the depths of its white face, saying: “In this case, I fear, you would only have to open and to shut the temple door, over and over again, during a period which, however short, would seem to you an eternity.”…

The clock had vanished, darkness made room for light, the voice of my old friend was drowned by a multitude of voices overhead on deck; and I awoke in my berth, covered with a cold perspiration, and faint with terror.

VIII
A Tale of Woe

We were at Hamburg, and no sooner had I seen my partners, who could hardly recognize me, than with their consent and good wishes I started for Nuremberg.

Half-an-hour after my arrival, the last doubt with regard to the correctness of my vision had disappeared. The reality was worse than any expectations could have made it, and I was henceforward doomed to the most desolate life. I ascertained that I had seen the terrible tragedy with all its heartrending details. My brother-in-law, killed under the wheels of a machine; my sister, insane, and now rapidly sinking towards her end; my niece – the sweet flower of nature’s fairest work – dishonored, in a den of infamy; the little children dead of a contagious disease in an orphanage; my last surviving nephew at sea, no one knew where. A whole house, a home of love and peace, scattered; and I, left alone, a witness of this world of death, of desolation and dishonor. The news filled me with infinite despair, and I sank helpless before this wholesale, dire disaster, which rose before me all at once. The shock proved too much, and I fainted. The last thing I heard before entirely losing my consciousness was a remark of the Burgmeister: “Had you, before leaving Kioto, telegraphed to the city authorities of your whereabouts, and of your intention of coming home to take charge of your young relatives, we might have placed them elsewhere, and thus have saved them from their fate. No one knew that the children had a well-to-do relative. They were left paupers and had to be dealt with as such. They were comparatively strangers in Nuremberg, and under the unfortunate circumstances you could hardly have expected anything else… I can only express my sincere sorrow.”

It was this terrible knowledge that I might, at any rate, have saved my young niece from her unmerited fate, but that through my neglect I had not done so, that was killing me. Had I but followed the friendly advice of the Bonze, Tamoora, and telegraphed to the authorities some weeks previous to my return much might have been avoided. It was all this, coupled with the fact that I could no longer doubt clairvoyance and clairaudience – the possibility of which I had so long denied – that brought me so heavily down upon my knees. I could avoid the censure of my fellow-creatures, but I could never escape the stings of my conscience, the reproaches of my own aching heart – no, not as long as I lived. I cursed my stubborn scepticism, my denial of facts, my early education, I cursed myself, and the whole world…

For several days I contrived not to sink beneath my load, for I had a duty to perform to the dead and to the living. But my sister once rescued from the pauper’s asylum, placed under the care of the best physicians, with her daughter to attend to her last moments, and the Jewess, whom I had brought to confess her crime, safely lodged in jail – my fortitude and strength suddenly abandoned me. Hardly a week after my arrival I was myself no better than a raving maniac, helpless in the strong grip of a brain fever. For several weeks I lay between life and death, the terrible disease defying the skill of the best physicians. At last my strong constitution prevailed, and – to my life-long sorrow – they proclaimed me saved.

I heard the news with a bleeding heart. Doomed to drag the loathsome burden of life henceforth alone, and in constant remorse; hoping for no help or remedy on earth, and still refusing to believe in the possibility of anything better than a short survival of consciousness beyond the grave, this unexpected return to life added only one more drop of gall to my bitter feelings. They were hardly soothed by the immediate return, during the first days of my convalescence, of those unwelcome and unsought for visions, whose correctness and reality I could deny no more. Alas the day! they were no longer in my sceptical, blind mind —

The children of an idle brain

Begot of nothing but vain fantasy;

but always the faithful photographs of the real woes and sufferings of my fellow creatures, of my best friends… Thus I found myself doomed, whenever I was left for a moment alone, to the helpless torture of a chained Prometheus. During the still hours of night, as though held by some pitiless iron hand, I found myself led to my sister’s bedside, forced to watch there hour after hour, and see the silent disintegration of her wasted organism; to witness and feel the sufferings that her own tenantless brain could no longer reflect or convey to her perceptions. But there was something still more horrible to barb the dart that could never be extricated. I had to look, by day, at the childish innocent face of my young niece, so sublimely simple and guileless in her pollution; and to witness, by night, how the full knowledge and recollection of her dishonor, of her young life now for ever blasted, came to her in her dreams, as soon as she was asleep. These dreams took an objective form to me, as they had done on the steamer; I had to live them over again, night after night, and feel the same terrible despair. For now, since I believed in the reality of seership, and had come to the conclusion that in our bodies lies hidden, as in the caterpillar, the chrysalis which may contain in its turn the butterfly – the symbol of the soul – I no longer remained indifferent, as of yore, to what I witnessed in my Soul-life. Something had suddenly developed in me, had broken loose from its icy cocoon. Evidently I no longer saw only in consequence of the identification of my inner nature with a Daij-Dzin; my visions arose in consequence of a direct personal psychic development, the fiendish creatures only taking care that I should see nothing of an agreeable or elevating nature. Thus, now, not an unconscious pang in my dying sister’s emaciated body, not a thrill of horror in my niece’s restless sleep at the recollection of the crime perpetrated upon her, an innocent child, but found a responsive echo in my bleeding heart. The deep fountain of sympathetic love and sorrow had gushed out from the physical heart, and was now loudly echoed by the awakened soul separated from the body. Thus had I to drain the cup of misery to the very dregs! Woe is me, it was a daily and nightly torture! Oh, how I mourned over my proud folly; how I was punished for having neglected to avail myself at Kioto of the proffered purification, for now I had come to believe even in the efficacy of the latter. The Daij-Dzin had indeed obtained control over me; and the fiend had let loose all the dogs of hell upon his victim…

At last the awful gulf was reached and crossed. The poor insane martyr dropped into her dark, and now welcome grave, leaving behind her, but for a few short months, her young, her first-born, daughter. Consumption made short work of that tender girlish frame. Hardly a year after my arrival, I was left alone in the whole wide world, my only surviving nephew having expressed a desire to follow his sea-faring career.

And now, the sequel of my sad, sad story is soon told. A wreck, a prematurely old man, looking at thirty as though sixty winters had passed over my doomed head, and owing to the never-ceasing visions, myself daily on the verge of insanity, I suddenly formed a desperate resolution. I would return to Kioto and seek out the Yamabooshi. I would prostrate myself at the feet of the holy man, and would not leave him until he had recalled the Frankenstein he had raised, the Frankenstein with whom at the time, it was I, myself, who would not part, through my insolent pride and unbelief.

Three months later I was in my Japanese home again, and I at once sought out my old, venerable Bonze, Tamoora Hideyeri, I now implored him to take me without an hour’s delay, to the Yamabooshi, the innocent cause of my daily tortures. His answer but placed the last, the supreme seal on my doom and tenfold intensified my despair. The Yamabooshi had left the country for lands unknown! He had departed one fine morning into the interior, on a pilgrimage, and according to custom, would be absent, unless natural death shortened the period, for no less than seven years!..

In this mischance, I applied for help and protection to other learned Yamabooshis; and though well aware how useless it was in my case to seek efficient cure from any other “adept,” my excellent old friend did everything he could to help me in my misfortune. But it was to no purpose, and the canker-worm of my life’s despair could not be thoroughly extricated. I found from them that not one of these learned men could promise to relieve me entirely from the demon of clairvoyant obsession. It was he who raised certain Daij-Dzins, calling on them to show futurity, or things that had already come to pass, who alone had full control over them. With kind sympathy, which I had now learned to appreciate, the holy men invited me to join the group of their disciples, and learn from them what I could do for myself. “Will alone, faith in your own soul powers, can help you now,” they said. “But it may take several years to undo even a part of the great mischief;” they added. “A Daij-Dzin is easily dislodged in the beginning; if left alone, he takes possession of a man’s nature, and it becomes almost impossible to uproot the fiend without killing his victim.”

Persuaded that there was nothing but this left for me to do, I gratefully assented, doing my best to believe in all that these holy men believed in, and yet ever failing to do so in my heart. The demon of unbelief and all-denial seemed rooted in me more firmly even than the Daij-Dzin. Still I did all I could do, decided as I was not to lose my last chance of salvation. Therefore, I proceeded without delay to free myself from the world and my commercial obligations, in order to live for several years an independent life. I settled my accounts with my Hamburg partners and severed my connection with the firm. Notwithstanding considerable financial losses resulting from such a precipitate liquidation, I found myself, after closing the accounts, a far richer man than I had thought I was. But wealth had no longer any attraction for me, now that I had no one to share it with, no one to work for. Life had become a burden; and such was my indifference to my future, that while giving away all my fortune to my nephew – in case he should return alive from his sea voyage – I should have neglected entirely even a small provision for myself, had not my native partner interfered and insisted upon my making it. I now recognized with Lao-tze, that Knowledge was the only firm hold for a man to trust to, as it is the only one that cannot be shaken by any tempest. Wealth is a weak anchor in days of sorrow, and self-conceit the most fatal counsellor. Hence I followed the advice of my friends, and laid aside for myself a modest sum, which would be sufficient to assure me a small income for life, or if I ever left my new friends and instructors. Having settled my earthly accounts and disposed of my belongings at Kioto, I joined the “Masters of the Long Vision,” who took me to their mysterious abode. There I remained for several years, studying very earnestly and in the most complete solitude, seeing no one but a few of the members of our religious community.

Many are the mysteries of nature that I have fathomed since then, and many a secret folio from the library of Tzion-ene have I devoured, obtaining thereby mastery over several kinds of invisible beings of a lower order. But the great secret of power over the terrible Daij-Dzin I could not get. It remains in the possession of a very limited number of the highest Initiates of Lao-tze, the great majority of the Yamabooshis themselves being ignorant how to obtain such mastery over the dangerous Elemental. One who would reach such power of control would have to become entirely identified with the Yamabooshis, to accept their views and beliefs, and to attain the highest degree of Initiation. Very naturally, I was found unfit to join the Fraternity, owing to many insurmountable reasons besides my congenital and ineradicable scepticism, though I tried hard to believe. Thus, partially relieved of my affliction and taught how to conjure the unwelcome visions away, I still remained, and do remain to this day, helpless to prevent their forced appearance before me now and then.

It was after assuring myself of my unfitness for the exalted position of an independent Seer and Adept that I reluctantly gave up any further trial. Nothing had been heard of the holy man, the first innocent cause of my misfortune; and the old Bonze himself, who occasionally visited me in my retreat, either could not, or would not, inform me of the whereabouts of the Yamabooshi. When, therefore, I had to give up all hope of his ever relieving me entirely from my fatal gift, I resolved to return to Europe, to settle in solitude for the rest of my life. With this object in view, I purchased through my late partners the Swiss châlet in which my hapless sister and I were born, where I had grown up under her care, and selected it for my future hermitage.

When bidding me farewell for ever on the steamer which took me back to my fatherland, the good old Bonze tried to console me for my disappointments. “My son,” he said, “regard all that happened to you as your Karma– a just retribution. No one who has subjected himself willingly to the power of a Daij-Dzin can ever hope to become a Rahat (an Adept), a high-souléd Yamabooshi – unless immediately purified. At best, as in your case, he may become fitted to oppose and to successfully fight off the fiend. Like a scar left after a poisonous wound, the trace of a Daij-Dzin can never be effaced from the Soul until purified by a new rebirth. Withal, feel not dejected, but be of good cheer in your affliction, since it has led you to acquire true knowledge, and to accept many a truth you would have otherwise rejected with contempt. And of this priceless knowledge, acquired through suffering and personal efforts – no Daij-Dzin can ever deprive you. Fare thee well, then, and may the Mother of Mercy, the great Queen of Heaven, afford you comfort and protection.”

We parted, and since then I have led the life of an anchorite, in constant solitude and study. Though still occasionally afflicted, I do not regret the years I have passed under the instruction of the Yamabooshis, but feel gratified for the knowledge received. Of the priest Tamoora Hideyeri I think always with sincere affection and respect. I corresponded regularly with him to the day of his death; an event which, with all its to me painful details, I had the unthanked-for privilege of witnessing across the seas, at the very hour in which it occurred.