Sri Aurobindo

Essays Divine and Human

Writings from Manuscripts. 1910 – 1950

A Dream

This is the story of a dream that often came and always fled, a dream that continued by snatches and glimpses through a succession of nights, at intervals of weeks,¹ the mind returning again and again to the unfinished vision, the imagination and intuition filling in the gaps and interstices of a half told tale. Visions of waters blue in an immortal sunlight or grey in the drifting of a magic welter of cloud and rain, rocks swept by the surf and whistling in their hollows with the wind, island meadows and glades many pictured above the sea, rivers and haze-purpled hills, a scene of unimaginable beauty where forms moved that had not lost the pristine beauty of man before the clutch stiffened on him of early decay and death, of grief and old age, where hearts beat that had not lost the pulsations of our ancient immortality and were not yet attuned to the broken rhythms of pain and grief. The impression of such an atmosphere and background remains which the linking of ineffective details and the effort of words which are laden with the thoughts of an afflicted and oppressed humanity, strive vainly to restore. For those colours we have lost. When we speak of brightness, it is a subdued brilliance that is the utmost our imaginations can conceive; we mean only a broken hint of rapture when we talk even most eagerly of enjoyment and bliss.

Circa 1910/14

¹ [In manuscript:] week

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