A box of delights

Abstract

“Have you had a nice dream?” young Kay Harker is asked at the end of The Box of Delights (1935). “Yes,” he replies, immediately undermining the preceding adventure. The book, by Poet Laureate John Masefield, is a sequel to The Midnight Folk (1927), in which Kay also teamed up with talking animals and journeyed into paintings to thwart the machinations of the villainous Abner Brown. The end of The Box of Delights might suggest that the events of that earlier book, too, were all a dream. That's disappointing because it means the dangers Kay faced in both books and the courage he showed are merely flights of fancy, and don't matter. It's especially galling to see it all thrown away on the last page.Yet The Box of Delights is also set at Christmas, when dreams mean something different. For one thing, they're important in the Nativity story. In Matthew 2, the Magi are warned in a dream not to tell Herod where he can find the infant Jesus; then Joseph is warned in a dream to flee with his family to Egypt to escape Herod's wrath. I'm interested in the interpretation of dreams in life and fiction–and how one use of dreams in particular shaped our modern sense of Christmas.Over the past century, dreams have gone from being the domain of mystics and soothsayers to the material of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and neuroscientists. Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) used dreams to reveal patients' deepest desires and anxieties. This psychiatric interest in dreams was still strong in 1953 when William Dement investigated the link between dreaming and the stage of deep sleep marked by rapid eye movement. Dement's use of EEG to study patients' sleep patterns is often seen as the first scientific study of dreams—known as oneirology—which continues to explore links between dreams and the functions of the brain. However, despite 60 years of work, we're still not entirely sure what the purpose of dreams are, or what triggers them. That gives fiction a lot of leeway in using them for dramatic effect.A recent notable use of dreams in fiction is the film Inception (2010). Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) breaks into the dreams of leading businessmen to steal their secrets and plant ideas in their subconscious that he can later exploit (if he only knew about the psychological phenomenon of priming, his life might be easier). The dreams themselves are largely the backdrop for a series of chases in which the normal laws of physics don't apply–people walk on walls or a city folds itself up. We get little sense that the content of a dream offers an insight into a particular dreamer's hidden desires and anxieties. In the film, dreams and reality are separate domains and should be kept distinct. A major plot element is the threat of Cobb losing track of what's real and what's not, and the risk of becoming unwittingly trapped in a dream world.An earlier film, Dreamscape (1984) similarly uses a main character who can get into other people's dreams as the starting point for a thriller. Here, Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid) realises that someone else with his ability is using it to kill people. At least early on, the film shows some interest in the scientific basis of dreams: Gardner is the subject of a research project run by Jane DeVries (Kate Capshaw), and there's mention of dreams occurring during the rapid eye movement stage of sleep. At one point, while DeVries is sleeping, Gardner steals into her dream and they have sex. On waking and realising what Gardner has done, DeVries is angry at being exploited. Gardner argues that DeVries consented when she thought it was just a dream, and that that shows her (unconscious) desire for him. It's at least a nod to Freud's psychoanalytic ideas, but the film spins even further beyond the evidence base with psychic powers and prophetic dreams.Films often use dreams for visceral effect. We're vulnerable when we sleep, so a horror movie about a villain that can invade people's dreams (eg, A Nightmare on Elm Street [1984]) is especially chilling. A film can also add extra shocks or twists by showing something horrible, then revealing it's a dream – even in the midst of real horrors, such as in The Plague of the Zombies (1966). Dream sequences are also a feature of film noir, usually when a character is knocked unconscious. On rare occasions such as in Alfred Hitchcock's psychoanalytic thriller Spellbound (1945), the Salvador Dali-designed dream reveals some new insight or clue in what we already know; mostly it's just a stylistic effect.I especially like Normal Again, a 2002 episode of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which the main character wakes to find herself in an inpatient mental health unit, her adventures fighting monsters all symptoms of her “undifferentiated type of schizophrenia”. We're told by a doctor that Buffy has “created an intricate latticework to support her primary delusion”, with imaginary friends, most with their own superpowers, and even an imaginary sister “to accommodate a need for a familial bond”. Brilliantly, the end of the episode leaves it open whether the whole television series is all just a delusion.What does Kay's dream in The Box of Delights reveal about his desires and anxieties? For all the magic, there's a sense of the real world as sinister and foreboding: gangsters and murders are in the news, there's a sense of danger in the darkness outside the house, and when Kay goes to deliver a message some boys throw stones at him. Rat, a friend in The Midnight Folk, has now become a villain and Kay's description suggests the politics of the schoolyard: “Kay had heard that everyone had dropped him”. There's a sense, too, of issues with authority: clergymen who turn out to be criminals, or the police inspector who several times ignores the evidence Kay brings him. A psychoanalyst might link these things to the fact that Kay's parents are absent—he's looked after by a guardian, Caroline Louisa.Alan Seymour's adaptation of the story for television–shown on BBC One in the lead-up to Christmas in 1984—deftly adds to this sense of Kay's own anxieties informing the dream. In the first episode, Kay sees large Alsatian dogs running through the countryside. “Many people have them now”, Caroline Louisa tells him, “for protection”. We're not told from what. When Herne and Kay transform into animals, in the book it's a delight but on television they're constantly in danger: as stags, they're chased by wolves; as birds they're chased by a hawk; as fish they're chased by a pike. Herne has to teach Kay to look out for these threats. Later, when Kay meets Arnold of Todi—the inventor of the box of delights—where the book had Kay rescue him, here Arnold turns on Kay and tries to trap him back in time. Interestingly, Kay's magical friends can't help him—he's saved by his friend Jemima, in the “real” world, calling out his name.The television version gives us a clearer sense of where Kay's dreams begin: after two clergyman have tricked him in a game of cards so that he owes money to the poor box, and after he's met the kindly old man that his dream turns into Cole Hawlings. The police inspector reveals that Kay has always had an interest in magic: they've often swapped tricks from the pages of The Magician. But there's still a sense of disappointment at the end that it's all been a dream. It doesn't help that both book and television version are set over several days, with Kay going to bed and dreaming, and even asking aloud if the magical events he's caught up in might be dreams. In fact, it is more than disappointing: it's cheating.I said there was a Christmas story that used dreams to shape our modern sense of Christmas. A Christmas Carol (1843) is usually described as a ghost story, but when the first ghost appears, Ebeneezer Scrooge has a rational explanation—it's a dream brought on by something Scrooge ate. “There's more of gravy than of grave about you,” he says. In fact, there's good evidence that Scrooge is dreaming. He learns nothing from the ghosts he doesn't already know (the events of his childhood and adolescence) or that he couldn't surmise (that he'll die). Scrooge knows the address of his clerk, Bob Cratchit, without having to look it up; presumably he'd also at least know of Bob's ill son, Tiny Tim.More than that, we can see what might have triggered this particular dream. The first ghost is of Jacob Marley, Scrooge's late business partner. In the first scene, a portly gentleman asking for donations to charity addresses Scooge as “Mr Marley”. It is, by coincidence, the seventh anniversary of Marley's death, and the first time Scrooge has heard the name mentioned in years. Then there's Scrooge's nephew Fred, who appeals to Scrooge every year to spend Christmas with him and his wife. Later we're told that this year the appeal shook Scrooge. A man as “solitary as an oyster”, his dream tells him to reconnect with people or he'll be like Marley. Just before Marley's ghost appears, Scrooge sits by a fireplace tiled with images from the scriptures, “angelic messengers descending through the air on clouds like feather-beds”.The narrator tells us that “Scrooge has as little of what is called fancy as any man in the city of London”, as if he'd never imagine such a thing as a man who wasn't there. But that turns out not to be true. When the ghost of Christmas past takes Scrooge back to his old school to see his younger self reading a book, Scrooge recalls ecstatically how, one particularly lonely Christmas, the books came to life, as if the characters were with him in the room. We don't see that Christmas; instead the ghost shows us Scrooge being rescued from his isolation. His sister arrives to tell him that “Father is so much kinder than he used to be, that home's like heaven! He spoke so gently to me one dear night when I was going to bed, that I was not afraid to ask him once more if you might come home.” If there's a suggestion of domestic violence in that, there's later the suggestion of poverty, too. He tells his fiancée—as she breaks off their engagement—that “there is nothing on which [the world] is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!” But her response is telling: “You fear the world too much.”If Scrooge has first-hand experience of poverty, it changes the first scene when he speaks of “idle people” and the “surplus population”, and refuses to give to charity because there's already the poor law and the workhouse. When the portly gentleman argues that many would rather die than go to the workhouse, Scrooge says “I don't know it”. But surely he does—it's a lie. And, as the ghosts make clear anyway, ignorance is no excuse.For all it's a ghost story, A Christmas Carol has a ring of truth about it. Its readers certainly thought so. According to the Gentleman's Magazine in early 1844, the success of A Christmas Carol led to an upsurge in charitable giving. The historian Ronald Hutton has even argued that the modern, secular version of Christmas, bound up in generous giving, is the invention of Dickens. The argument seems to be that the book created what Scrooge's nephew Fred describes, with Christmas becoming a time when “men and women seem by one consent to open their shut up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys”. Not bad for a dream. “Have you had a nice dream?” young Kay Harker is asked at the end of The Box of Delights (1935). “Yes,” he replies, immediately undermining the preceding adventure. The book, by Poet Laureate John Masefield, is a sequel to The Midnight Folk (1927), in which Kay also teamed up with talking animals and journeyed into paintings to thwart the machinations of the villainous Abner Brown. The end of The Box of Delights might suggest that the events of that earlier book, too, were all a dream. That's disappointing because it means the dangers Kay faced in both books and the courage he showed are merely flights of fancy, and don't matter. It's especially galling to see it all thrown away on the last page. Yet The Box of Delights is also set at Christmas, when dreams mean something different. For one thing, they're important in the Nativity story. In Matthew 2, the Magi are warned in a dream not to tell Herod where he can find the infant Jesus; then Joseph is warned in a dream to flee with his family to Egypt to escape Herod's wrath. I'm interested in the interpretation of dreams in life and fiction–and how one use of dreams in particular shaped our modern sense of Christmas. Over the past century, dreams have gone from being the domain of mystics and soothsayers to the material of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and neuroscientists. Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) used dreams to reveal patients' deepest desires and anxieties. This psychiatric interest in dreams was still strong in 1953 when William Dement investigated the link between dreaming and the stage of deep sleep marked by rapid eye movement. Dement's use of EEG to study patients' sleep patterns is often seen as the first scientific study of dreams—known as oneirology—which continues to explore links between dreams and the functions of the brain. However, despite 60 years of work, we're still not entirely sure what the purpose of dreams are, or what triggers them. That gives fiction a lot of leeway in using them for dramatic effect. A recent notable use of dreams in fiction is the film Inception (2010). Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) breaks into the dreams of leading businessmen to steal their secrets and plant ideas in their subconscious that he can later exploit (if he only knew about the psychological phenomenon of priming, his life might be easier). The dreams themselves are largely the backdrop for a series of chases in which the normal laws of physics don't apply–people walk on walls or a city folds itself up. We get little sense that the content of a dream offers an insight into a particular dreamer's hidden desires and anxieties. In the film, dreams and reality are separate domains and should be kept distinct. A major plot element is the threat of Cobb losing track of what's real and what's not, and the risk of becoming unwittingly trapped in a dream world. An earlier film, Dreamscape (1984) similarly uses a main character who can get into other people's dreams as the starting point for a thriller. Here, Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid) realises that someone else with his ability is using it to kill people. At least early on, the film shows some interest in the scientific basis of dreams: Gardner is the subject of a research project run by Jane DeVries (Kate Capshaw), and there's mention of dreams occurring during the rapid eye movement stage of sleep. At one point, while DeVries is sleeping, Gardner steals into her dream and they have sex. On waking and realising what Gardner has done, DeVries is angry at being exploited. Gardner argues that DeVries consented when she thought it was just a dream, and that that shows her (unconscious) desire for him. It's at least a nod to Freud's psychoanalytic ideas, but the film spins even further beyond the evidence base with psychic powers and prophetic dreams. Films often use dreams for visceral effect. We're vulnerable when we sleep, so a horror movie about a villain that can invade people's dreams (eg, A Nightmare on Elm Street [1984]) is especially chilling. A film can also add extra shocks or twists by showing something horrible, then revealing it's a dream – even in the midst of real horrors, such as in The Plague of the Zombies (1966). Dream sequences are also a feature of film noir, usually when a character is knocked unconscious. On rare occasions such as in Alfred Hitchcock's psychoanalytic thriller Spellbound (1945), the Salvador Dali-designed dream reveals some new insight or clue in what we already know; mostly it's just a stylistic effect. I especially like Normal Again, a 2002 episode of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which the main character wakes to find herself in an inpatient mental health unit, her adventures fighting monsters all symptoms of her “undifferentiated type of schizophrenia”. We're told by a doctor that Buffy has “created an intricate latticework to support her primary delusion”, with imaginary friends, most with their own superpowers, and even an imaginary sister “to accommodate a need for a familial bond”. Brilliantly, the end of the episode leaves it open whether the whole television series is all just a delusion. What does Kay's dream in The Box of Delights reveal about his desires and anxieties? For all the magic, there's a sense of the real world as sinister and foreboding: gangsters and murders are in the news, there's a sense of danger in the darkness outside the house, and when Kay goes to deliver a message some boys throw stones at him. Rat, a friend in The Midnight Folk, has now become a villain and Kay's description suggests the politics of the schoolyard: “Kay had heard that everyone had dropped him”. There's a sense, too, of issues with authority: clergymen who turn out to be criminals, or the police inspector who several times ignores the evidence Kay brings him. A psychoanalyst might link these things to the fact that Kay's parents are absent—he's looked after by a guardian, Caroline Louisa. Alan Seymour's adaptation of the story for television–shown on BBC One in the lead-up to Christmas in 1984—deftly adds to this sense of Kay's own anxieties informing the dream. In the first episode, Kay sees large Alsatian dogs running through the countryside. “Many people have them now”, Caroline Louisa tells him, “for protection”. We're not told from what. When Herne and Kay transform into animals, in the book it's a delight but on television they're constantly in danger: as stags, they're chased by wolves; as birds they're chased by a hawk; as fish they're chased by a pike. Herne has to teach Kay to look out for these threats. Later, when Kay meets Arnold of Todi—the inventor of the box of delights—where the book had Kay rescue him, here Arnold turns on Kay and tries to trap him back in time. Interestingly, Kay's magical friends can't help him—he's saved by his friend Jemima, in the “real” world, calling out his name. The television version gives us a clearer sense of where Kay's dreams begin: after two clergyman have tricked him in a game of cards so that he owes money to the poor box, and after he's met the kindly old man that his dream turns into Cole Hawlings. The police inspector reveals that Kay has always had an interest in magic: they've often swapped tricks from the pages of The Magician. But there's still a sense of disappointment at the end that it's all been a dream. It doesn't help that both book and television version are set over several days, with Kay going to bed and dreaming, and even asking aloud if the magical events he's caught up in might be dreams. In fact, it is more than disappointing: it's cheating. I said there was a Christmas story that used dreams to shape our modern sense of Christmas. A Christmas Carol (1843) is usually described as a ghost story, but when the first ghost appears, Ebeneezer Scrooge has a rational explanation—it's a dream brought on by something Scrooge ate. “There's more of gravy than of grave about you,” he says. In fact, there's good evidence that Scrooge is dreaming. He learns nothing from the ghosts he doesn't already know (the events of his childhood and adolescence) or that he couldn't surmise (that he'll die). Scrooge knows the address of his clerk, Bob Cratchit, without having to look it up; presumably he'd also at least know of Bob's ill son, Tiny Tim. More than that, we can see what might have triggered this particular dream. The first ghost is of Jacob Marley, Scrooge's late business partner. In the first scene, a portly gentleman asking for donations to charity addresses Scooge as “Mr Marley”. It is, by coincidence, the seventh anniversary of Marley's death, and the first time Scrooge has heard the name mentioned in years. Then there's Scrooge's nephew Fred, who appeals to Scrooge every year to spend Christmas with him and his wife. Later we're told that this year the appeal shook Scrooge. A man as “solitary as an oyster”, his dream tells him to reconnect with people or he'll be like Marley. Just before Marley's ghost appears, Scrooge sits by a fireplace tiled with images from the scriptures, “angelic messengers descending through the air on clouds like feather-beds”. The narrator tells us that “Scrooge has as little of what is called fancy as any man in the city of London”, as if he'd never imagine such a thing as a man who wasn't there. But that turns out not to be true. When the ghost of Christmas past takes Scrooge back to his old school to see his younger self reading a book, Scrooge recalls ecstatically how, one particularly lonely Christmas, the books came to life, as if the characters were with him in the room. We don't see that Christmas; instead the ghost shows us Scrooge being rescued from his isolation. His sister arrives to tell him that “Father is so much kinder than he used to be, that home's like heaven! He spoke so gently to me one dear night when I was going to bed, that I was not afraid to ask him once more if you might come home.” If there's a suggestion of domestic violence in that, there's later the suggestion of poverty, too. He tells his fiancée—as she breaks off their engagement—that “there is nothing on which [the world] is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!” But her response is telling: “You fear the world too much.” If Scrooge has first-hand experience of poverty, it changes the first scene when he speaks of “idle people” and the “surplus population”, and refuses to give to charity because there's already the poor law and the workhouse. When the portly gentleman argues that many would rather die than go to the workhouse, Scrooge says “I don't know it”. But surely he does—it's a lie. And, as the ghosts make clear anyway, ignorance is no excuse. For all it's a ghost story, A Christmas Carol has a ring of truth about it. Its readers certainly thought so. According to the Gentleman's Magazine in early 1844, the success of A Christmas Carol led to an upsurge in charitable giving. The historian Ronald Hutton has even argued that the modern, secular version of Christmas, bound up in generous giving, is the invention of Dickens. The argument seems to be that the book created what Scrooge's nephew Fred describes, with Christmas becoming a time when “men and women seem by one consent to open their shut up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys”. Not bad for a dream.