W. B. Yeats, Dream, Vision, and the Dead

This essay examines the role that dream and vision play in Yeats’s creative life and thought. It considers early Theosophical influences on his approach to the nature of dreams, and how the dream-state features in Yeats’s practice of the Golden Dawn’s Hermetic cabalism, drawing extensively on the unpublished diary that Yeats kept in the “PIAL Notebook” in 1908 and 1909. Yeats held dream to offer access to otherwise unperceived aspects of reality, and as his interest in contact with the dead and spiritualism increased in the 1910s, he theorized on the possibilities offered by the dream state, and the essay considers a series of lectures he gave on the subject. It then moves on to the place of dreams in the sessions of automatic writing that he carried out with his wife, George, and the work that these gave rise to, A Vision. Throughout, it considers how these concerns and interests fed into Yeats’s creativity and art.