The Manticore

(It was not easy work, this dredging up what could be recovered of my childish past and displying it before another person. Quite a different thing from realizing, as everybody does, that at some far-off time they have not behaved well. It was at this period that I had a dream, or a vision between waking and sleeping one night, that I was once again on that pier and was wiping filth and oil from the face of a drowned figure; but as I worked I saw that it was not my father, but a child who lay there, and that the child was myself.)

2

Dreaming had become a common experience for me, though I had never been a great dreamer. Dr. von Haller asked me to recover some dreams from childhood, and although I was doubtful, I found that I could do so. There was my dream from my sixth year that I saw Jesus in the sky, floating upward as in pictures of the Ascension; within His mantle, and it seemed to me part of His very figure, was a globe of the world, which He engulfed as though protecting it and displaying it to me, as I stood in the middle of the road down below. Had this been a dream, or a day-time vision? I could never satisfactorily decide, but it was brilliantly clear. And of course there was my recurrent dream, so often experienced, always in a somewhat different form but always the same in the quality of dread and terror that it brought. In this dream I was in a castle or fortress, closed against the outer world, and I was the keeper of a treasure – or sometimes it seemed to be a god or idol – the nature of which I never knew though its value was great in my mind. An Enemy was threatening it from without; this Enemy would run from window to window, looking for a way in, and I would pant from room to room to thwart it and keep it at bay. This dream had been attributed by Netty to my reading of a book called The Little Lame Prince, in which a lonely boy lived in a tower, and the book was arbitrarily forbidden; Netty liked to forbid books and always mistrusted them. But I knew perfectly well that I had had the dream long before I read the book and continued to have it long after the book had lost colour in my mind. The intensity of the dream and its sense of threat were of quite a different order from any book I knew.

Dr. von Haller and I worked for some time on this dream, trying to recover associations that would throw light on it. Although it seems plain enough to me now, it took several days for me to recognize that the tower was my life, and the treasure was what made it precious and worth defending against the Enemy. But who was this Enemy? Here we had quite a struggle because I insisted that the Enemy was external, whereas Dr. von Haller kept leading me back to some point at which I had to admit that the Enemy might be some portion of myself – some inadmissible entity in David which did not accept every circumstance of his life at face value, and which, if it beheld the treasure or the idol, might not agree about its superlative value. But at last, when I had swallowed that and admitted with some reluctance that it might be true, I was anxious to consider what the treasure might be, and it was here that the doctor showed reluctance. Better to wait, she said, and perhaps the answer would emerge of itself.

DR. VON HALLER: We do not want to use your grandfather's severe methods for getting at harmful things, do we? We must not press you down upon the hateful, invading spike. Let it alone, allow Nature to have her curative way, and all will be well.

MYSELF: I'm not afraid, you know. I'm willing to go straight ahead and get it over.

DR. VON HALLER: You have had quite enough of being a little soldier for the moment. Please accept my assurance that patience will bring better results here than force.

MYSELF: I don't want to go on stressing this, but I am not a stupid person. Haven't I been quick to accept – as an hypothesis anyhow – your ideas about dream interpretation?