ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
November 13
Robert Louis Stevenson and the Dreaming Self
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One night
in the autumn of 1885, in a house in Bournemouth on England’s south coast,
Fanny Stevenson woke to the sound of her husband crying out in his sleep.
Alarmed, she shook him awake. Instead of thanking her, he was indignant. He had
been dreaming, he protested, “a fine bogey tale,” and she had interrupted it at
the most thrilling moment.
That
interrupted nightmare became Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde, and its dreamer, born in Edinburgh on November 13, 1850,
was Robert Louis Stevenson.
He would spend the rest of his life wondering who, exactly, had written it:
himself, or the little people who worked in the dark…
Stevenson came by his nightmares honestly. A sickly only child, often confined to bed with lung ailments, he was raised largely by his devoted nurse, Alison Cunningham, whom he called “Cummy.” She read to him from the Bible and from tales of the persecuted Scottish Covenanters, and filled his nights with vivid images of sin, judgment, and hellfire. In later life Stevenson described the night terrors of his childhood with real feeling, along with dreams so intense he struggled to tell them apart from waking life. His Edinburgh, too, was a city of doubles: the elegant Georgian New Town where the respectable lived, and the dark, crowded closes of the medieval Old Town just across the valley.
Edinburgh even
supplied him with a real-life Jekyll: William Brodie, a respected cabinetmaker
and town councillor in the eighteenth century, spent his nights as a burglar,
using his trade’s access to his clients’ locks and keys, until he was caught
and hanged in 1788. According to family tradition, a cabinet made by Brodie
stood in young Stevenson’s bedroom. The story haunted him enough that, as a
young man, he co-wrote a play with his friend W. E. Henley called
Deacon Brodie, or The Double
Life. The theme of the respectable man with a secret second self
was with him long before the dream arrived.
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By 1885, Stevenson was an invalid in Bournemouth, wracked by lung hemorrhages and desperate for money. In his essay “A Chapter on Dreams,” written in 1887 and published in Scribner’s Magazine the following January, he recalled spending two days racking his brain for a plot, until his dreams delivered the essential scenes: a figure at a window, and a man pursued for a crime who swallows a powder and transforms in front of his pursuers. What happened next is a mystery of its own. Fanny read the first draft and argued that he had missed its true point, writing it as a mere sensational story rather than as an allegory. The draft went into the fire. For a century, Stevenson was said to have burned it himself in a fit of pique, but a letter from Fanny to Henley, discovered in 2000, has been read by some as evidence that she may have destroyed it herself. Either way, the rewritten novella appeared in January 1886 and became a sensation.
What makes “A
Chapter on Dreams” so valuable to the occult reader is Stevenson’s explanation
of where his stories came from. He credited his dreams to “the Little People,”
or his “Brownies,” borrowing the household spirits of Scottish folklore who
secretly finish a family’s chores at night, so long as no one watches them or
tries to pay them. His Brownies, he wrote, worked tirelessly while he slept,
staging plays in the theater of his mind and handing him plots he could never
have devised awake. They were brilliant collaborators but untrustworthy ones:
in his words, they had “not a rudiment of what we call a conscience,” and so
he, the waking self, was left to supply the morality. Read closely, the essay
is almost a second Jekyll and Hyde, describing a writer who is himself
divided between a daylight personality and a hidden nocturnal one.
That idea
arrived at exactly the right moment in the history of psychology. The 1880s
were the great decade of research into “double consciousness” and dissociation,
when French physicians studied patients like Louis Vivet, whose personality
seemed to split into distinct selves with different memories and characters. In
England, the classicist and psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers,
a founder of the Society for Psychical Research,
was developing his theory of the “subliminal self,” a vast hidden region of the
mind capable of creativity, memory, and perhaps even telepathy. Myers began
corresponding with Stevenson about Jekyll and Hyde in 1886, and in 1892,
writing in the Society’s Proceedings, he praised Stevenson’s account of
his Brownies as among the most successful dream-experiments ever recorded.
Stevenson, for his part, sent Myers further reports of his strange dream
states, including the sense of a separate self observing his own illness.
Later psychologists found just as much in the novella. Readers of Freud have seen in it the conflict between respectable consciousness and repressed desire, and many readers of Jung have found in Mr. Hyde one of literature’s most vivid portraits of the shadow, the disowned part of the personality that grows more dangerous the more it’s denied. Stevenson himself offered a remarkable psychological detail: when Jekyll first becomes Hyde, he finds his darker self smaller, slighter, and younger than himself, because that side of his nature had been so little exercised. It’s hard to imagine a more elegant description of a neglected shadow. As always, a word of caution is in order: Stevenson wrote decades before Jung coined the term, and the novella belongs to its own Victorian world of Calvinist guilt, dissociation research, and psychical inquiry, not to any later theory.
Stevenson left
Britain in 1887, settled at last in Samoa, where the islanders called him
Tusitala, the “teller of tales,” and died there in December 1894, only
forty-four years old. He never fully resolved the question his dreams raised,
of whether a writer is the author of his stories or merely their first
audience. For practitioners who work with dreams, trance, and the hidden
reaches of the mind, his answer still rings true: the Brownies are real, in
whatever sense matters, and the wise dreamer learns to keep a notebook by the
bed.
By David Tacey | Aeon Books
David Tacey’s Jung
and Spirituality, published by Aeon Books in 2025, explores the spiritual
implications of Carl Jung’s psychology for modern readers. Tacey is one of the
most respected voices in Jungian studies today: an Emeritus Professor at La
Trobe University in Melbourne, a teacher at the Jung Institute in Zürich, and
the author of sixteen books, including How to Read Jung and The
Postsecular Sacred. His central theme is Jung’s conviction that a spiritual
life lies buried in every person’s unconscious, and that the modern world’s
rationality and pride have led it to repress the spiritual as harmfully as the
Victorians repressed the sexual. From there, the book ranges across the return
of the sacred to religion and nature, the spiritual journey, the meaning of
dreams, the individuation of the self, and the healing power of spiritual life.
What makes it
the right pairing for today’s post is that it takes seriously exactly what
Stevenson described in “A Chapter on Dreams”: the sense that something wiser,
stranger, and less conventional than the waking self is at work in the depths
of the psyche. Tacey’s Jungian lens helps readers understand why Stevenson’s
Brownies felt like autonomous collaborators, why Hyde grew stronger the more he
was denied, and why dreams can be both creative gifts and moral challenges. It
also offers a bridge between psychology and practice, of particular interest to
readers who work with dreams, imagination, and inner journeying.
This is a book of Jungian psychology and spirituality rather than literary criticism, and Stevenson himself doesn’t feature in it, so readers wanting a study of Jekyll and Hyde will need to look to scholarly editions of the novella. Its tone is reflective and essayistic rather than practical. But for readers who finished today’s post wondering what the Brownies really were, and what Mr. Hyde might be trying to tell each of us, Tacey offers a wise and illuminating place to begin.
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