The Book of Disquiet (60 page)

Now if you dream about masturbating, all fine and good. If you dream about smoking opium or taking morphine, and become intoxicated from the idea of the opium,
of the morphine of your dreams, then you deserve to be praised: you are performing like a perfect dreamer.

Always think of yourself as sadder and more miserable than you are. There’s no harm in it. It even serves as a kind of trick ladder to the world of dreams.

Postpone everything. Never do today what you can leave for tomorrow.* In fact you need not do anything at all, tomorrow or today.

Never think about what you’re going to do. Don’t do it.

Live your life. Don’t be lived by it. Right or wrong, happy or sad, be your own self. You can do this only by dreaming, because your real life, your human life, is the one that doesn’t belong to you but to others. You must replace your life with your dreaming, concentrating only on dreaming perfectly. In all the acts of your real life, from that of being born to that of dying, you don’t act – you’re acted; you don’t live – you’re merely lived.

Become an inscrutable sphinx to others. Shut yourself in your ivory tower, but without slamming the door. Your ivory tower is you.

And if someone tells you this is false and absurd, don’t believe it. But don’t believe in what I say either, because one ought not believe in anything.

Disdain everything, but in such a way that your disdain doesn’t disturb you. Don’t think you’re superior because you disdain. This is the key to the art of noble disdain.

By virtue of dreaming everything, everything in life will make you suffer more.....

That’s the cross you will have to bear.

Reason,
– everything is easy and
, because everything for me is a dream. I decide to dream something and I dream it. Sometimes I create in myself a philosopher, who methodically expounds philosophies while I, a young page, pay court to his daughter, whose soul I am, outside the window of her house.

I’m limited, of course, by what I know. I can’t create a mathematician. But I’m content with what I have, which already allows for infinite combinations and countless dreams. And perhaps, through dreaming, I’ll achieve still more. Though it’s not really worth the bother. I’m already quite satisfied.

Pulverization of the personality
: I don’t know what my ideas are, nor my feelings or my character… When I feel something, I feel it only vaguely, in the visualized person of some being or other that appears in me.
I’ve replaced my own self with my dreams
. Each person is merely his own dream of himself. I’m not even that.

Never read a book to the end, nor in sequence and without skipping.

I’ve never known what I felt. Whenever people spoke to me of such and such emotion and described it, I always felt they were describing
something in my soul, but when I thought about it later, I always doubted. I never know if what I feel I am is what I really am or merely what I think I am. I’m a character of* my own plays.

Effort is useless but entertains. Reason is sterile but amusing. To love is tiresome but is perhaps preferable to not loving. Dreaming, however, substitutes for everything. In dreams I can have the impression of effort without actual effort. I can enter battles without the risk of getting scared or being wounded. I can reason without aiming to arrive at some truth (which I would never arrive at in any case), without trying to solve some problem (which I know I would never solve)..... I can love without worrying about being rejected or cheated on, and without getting bored. I can change my sweetheart and she’ll always be the same. And should I wish to be cheated on or spurned, I can make it happen, and always in the way I want, always in the way that gives me pleasure. In dreams I can experience the worst anxieties, the harshest torments, the greatest victories. I can experience all of it as if it happened in life; it depends only on my ability to make my dreams vivid, sharp, real. This requires study and inner patience.

There are various ways of dreaming. One is to surrender completely to your dreams, without trying to make them clear and sharp, letting yourself go in the hazy twilight of the sensations they arouse. This is an inferior, tiresome form of dreaming, for it’s monotonous, always the same. Rather different is the clear and
directed
dream, but the effort expended on directing it makes the dream too obviously artificial. The supreme artist – the kind of dreamer I am – expends only the effort of
wanting
his dream to be such and such, in accord with his whims, and it unfolds before him exactly as he would have desired but could never have conceived, because the mental effort would have worn him out. I want to dream of myself as a king. I decide all of a sudden that this is what I want, and lo and behold I’m the king of some country. Which one and what kind, the dream will tell me. For I’ve so triumphed over my dreams that they always unexpectedly bring me what I want. By focusing more sharply, I can perfect those scenes of life that come to me as only vague impressions. I would be utterly incapable of consciously picturing the various Middle Ages of diverse eras on diverse Earths
that I’ve experienced in dreams. I’m amazed at the wealth of imagination that I never realized was in me. I let my dreams go their own way… They’ve become so pure that they always surpass my expectations. They’re always even more beautiful than what I wanted. But only the most advanced dreamer can hope to reach this point. I’ve spent years dreamingly striving for this, and today I achieve it without effort.

The best way to start dreaming is through books. Novels are especially helpful for the beginner. The first step is to learn to give in completely to your reading, to live totally with the characters of a novel. You’ll know you’re making progress when your own family and its troubles seem insipid and loathsome by comparison. It’s best to avoid reading literary novels, which tend to divert our attention to the formal structure.

I’m not ashamed to admit that this is how I started. Strangely enough, detective novels,
are what I
instinctively read. I was never able to read romantic novels in any sustained way, but this is for personal reasons, I being romantically disinclined even in my dreams. Let each man cultivate his particular inclination. Let us never forget that to dream is to explore ourselves. Sensual souls, for their reading matter, should choose the opposite of what I read.