Hervey de Saint-Denys: Directing Dreams

In 1867 a book appeared in Paris with no author's name on it: Les Reves et les moyens de les diriger, observations pratiques. Dreams and the ways to direct them. Shortly after publication the publisher, Amyot, went bankrupt, and copies became scarce almost immediately.

Thirty-two years later Freud was still looking for one. In Die Traumdeutung he refers to the book three times and admits, of its author, that it was a work he could not lay hands on in spite of all his efforts. The most important dream book of the nineteenth century was written by a man who did not sign it, printed by a house that collapsed, and never read by the person who went on to define the field.

The author's identity came out in 1878, in a footnote by Alfred Maury.

Marie-Jean-Leon Lecoq, marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys, was born in Paris on 6 May 1822 and died there on 2 November 1892. His public life had nothing to do with dreams. He was a sinologist: professor of Chinese at the school of oriental languages from 1868, then holder of the chair of Chinese at the College de France from 1874 until his death, succeeding Stanislas Julien. He presided over the Societe d'ethnographie, was elected to the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1878, and served as its president in 1888.

The dream work was the thing he did at night, for himself, for decades, and published without his name on it. Knowing that changes how the book reads. It is not the manifesto of an enthusiast. It is the field notebook of a professional philologist who happened to turn his own sleep into the material.

He started at thirteen. He wrote his dreams down every morning, and he kept doing it for more than five years without a serious break: twenty-two notebooks, 1,946 nights on which he recalled something. After the first year he began adding drawings in colour, because language was losing detail the images still held.

The order in that sequence is the whole method, and almost every modern guide gets it backwards. He did not set out to control his dreams. He set out to remember them, and control arrived as a consequence. In his own account, recall came first and thickened over months; then came the recognition, inside the dream, that he was dreaming; and only then the ability to steer.

His description of the state is precise and worth having in his words rather than in a summary: being often aware of his true situation while asleep, and therefore keeping sufficient control of his ideas to guide their development.

Here is the piece of work that should have made him famous outside dream circles, because it is a real experiment with a control built into it.

He wanted to know whether a memory could be summoned into a dream on purpose. So on each journey he bought a different perfume. Every day in that place he opened a handkerchief soaked in it and breathed it in, binding the scent to the location. Then he went home and waited, months, long enough for the association to sink out of daily reach.

Then he had a servant sprinkle a few drops of one of those perfumes on his pillow while he slept, without telling him which or when. He dreamed of the place. He reported dreaming of the mountains of the Ardeche when the Ardeche perfume was used.

And then he pushed it. Two perfumes on the pillow on the same night, from two different journeys, and the dream came back blended: elements of both places in one landscape. That is not an anecdote about smelling something nice before bed. It is a cue-conditioning protocol run on himself in the 1860s, and the design anticipates by more than a century what sleep laboratories now call targeted memory reactivation, in which an odour or a sound paired with a memory while awake is replayed during sleep to strengthen or trigger it.

He had no electroencephalograph, no sleep stages, no way to know when to deliver the cue. He used a servant and a pillow.

Less than the modern literature does, and that restraint is the reason he is still readable.

He does not claim you can do anything you like inside a dream. He claims that awareness of the state is trainable, that once you have it your ideas can be guided rather than merely undergone, and that the dream continues to obey rules you did not write. He tested those rules from the inside: what happens if you look away and look back, whether a figure answers when you know it is not real, whether an object stays where you left it. He records the failures alongside the successes, which is why the book survives as a document rather than as a set of instructions.

He also insisted that the material is entirely your own. Nothing enters a dream that did not come in through your senses first. His experiments were designed to demonstrate exactly that, which makes him an odd founder for a literature that would later go looking for something else in dreams.

Recall first, and give it months. A notebook by the bed, written before you move or speak, every morning, including the mornings when there is nothing. He got fragments before he got scenes and scenes before he got lucidity.

Draw what words will not hold. He started drawing after a year for a reason: colour, spatial arrangement and the shape of a face degrade fast in language and survive in a sketch, however bad the sketch is.

Build a sensory anchor. This is his real contribution and almost nobody does it. Bind one specific smell to one specific place or period while you are awake and paying attention. Wait. Then reintroduce it at night. The cue is the lever.

Expect the recognition to arrive on its own. It shows up as a small inconsistency you catch rather than a decision you make, and it arrives after recall is solid, not before.

One last date, for the record. Frederik van Eeden gave English the phrase lucid dream in 1913. Hervey de Saint-Denys had been recording and directing the state for forty-six years by then, in a book almost no one could buy. The English translation, Dreams and How to Guide Them, arrived in 1982. A 1964 French reprint quietly dropped his appendix on hashish, restored in 1991.