BOOKSHIP

“I dream with open eyes... and others see my dreams,” says Backhouse, the medium who can manifest apparitions from other worlds, in David Lindsay‘s debut novel A Voyage to Arcturus. And what better way to describe that novel—which notoriously sold poorly on its first release in 1920 but has since attained the status of a classic of imaginative and visionary fiction, praised by the likes of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Colin Wilson, Philip Pullman, and Alan Moore—than as a dream rendered in prose? And visions, dreams, and glimpses of other realities feature in Lindsay’s subsequent novels The Haunted Woman, Sphinx, Devil’s Tor, The Violet Apple, and The Witch.

The intense inner life revealed through Lindsay’s novels only throw the details of his outer life into an enigmatic light. Building on the brief accounts first published in the “Lindsay revival” of the 1970s and 1980s, I Dream With Open Eyes combines the existing information with new details garnered from family history records, contemporary newspapers (including a close look at the reviews his works received in their day), and other sources to flesh out the life of this private, imaginative man who believed he had “a message for humanity”. It concludes with a look at Lindsay’s posthumous reputation, and the adaptations inspired by his most famous work, in the century following the publication of A Voyage to Arcturus.