Sleep and Dream Notebooks

Abstract

In Pasadena, California, on 29 Mar 20, Dionertes informed the Yeatses that he did “not really want script here” adding that he “prefer[ed] to use other methods — sleeps”. Writing in a NB recording “various supernatural events since we came to America”, in an entry tentatively dated 28 Mar 20, Yeats described the “New Method”: “George speaks while asleap”. Two months later, in Montreal waiting for passage to England, George explained further: “There was to be a new method. We were to read over sleep accounts & Dionertes would then develop the subject day by day”. Although the Yeatses preserved only four sizeable NBs and a few loose collections (which we have called NBs) recording these phenomena, Yeats suggested in Nov 1928 that there had been more: “Exposition in sleep came to an end in 1920, and I began an exhaustive study of some fifty copy-books of automatic script, and of a much smaller numer of books recording what had come in sleep.”¹ Either Yeats’s memory was imprecise or some portions of these visionary materials are lost or misplaced. From the first entries in the “SDNBs”, Yeats and George are actors in a dramatic narrative of their research for the writing of VA. These NBs recording experiences from 28 Mar 20 to 9 July 23 reveal much about their personalities as well as the techniques and findings of their research.