kagablog

…

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.

When the dreamer experiences physical sensation - when a novel about combat, flights and battles leaves his body really exhausted and his legs worn out - then he has passed beyond the first stage of dreaming. In the case of the sensual soul, he should be able - without any masturbation except in his mind - to experience an ejaculation at the appropriate moment during the novel.

Next, the dreamer should try to transfer all of this to the mental plane. The dreamed ejaculation (which I choose as the most violent and striking example) should be felt without actually happening. The fatigue will be greater, but the pleasure will be incomparably more intense.

…

The second stage is to construct novels for your own enjoyment. This should be attempted only once dreaming has become perfectly mentalized, as described above. Otherwise, the effort to set a novel in motion will hinder the smooth mentalization of pleasure.

Third stage: Once our imagination has been trained, it will fashion dreams all by itself whenever we want.

At this point there’s hardly even any mental fatigue. The dissolution of personality is total. We are mere ashes endowed with a soul but no form - not even that of water, which adopts the shape of the vessel that holds it.

With this thoroughly established, complete and autonomous plays can unfold in us line by line. We may no longer have the energy to write them, but that won’t be necessary. We’ll be able to create secondhand; we can imagine one poet writing in us in one way, while another poet will write in a different way. I, having refined this skill to a considerable dgree, can write in countlessly different ways, all of them original.

The highest stage of dreaming is when, having created a picture with various figures whose lives we live all at the same time, we are jointly and interactively all of those souls. This leads to an incredible degree of depersonalization and the reduction of our spirit to ashes, and it is hard, I admit, not to feel a general weariness throughout one’s entire being. But what triumph!

This is the only final asceticism. It’s an asceticism without faith, and without any god.

God am I.

fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet