THE ENCHANTED ISLE

Evening Star, Issue 19271, 9 June 1926, Page 5

THE ENCHANTED ISLE

Premonitory dreams are the most mysterious of all, but there is no longer any doubt that they occur, writes Louise Rice, in the ‘ World Magazine.’ From the time that the Babylonian king saw the mysterious handwriting on the wall (undoubtedly in a dream, as is shown by the original text) down to the strange dreams which filled the sleep of those who had bought tickets for the ill-fated steamship Lusitania, men and women have heard and seen that in sleep which could have told of the future. In all nations and in all times the thought ami visions of a mysterious island have meant that someone—either ourself or of those connected with us, is near to death. The persistent use of the figure of the enchanted isle which runs all through the ‘ Tales of the Round Table ’ do not originate there, but can he found thousands of years before that in the literature of the East.

Just a few years ago Sir James Barrie wrote the weird story of ‘ Mary Rose,’ a little girl who disappeared on a strange uninhabited island off the coast or Scotland, and of her second disappearance when she was a young woman. That play is full of all the secret meanings of dreams, for Barrie is a man who has studied dream lore as few moderns have. So little is this very important matter understood that many or the things which he puts in the mouths of his characters in the play have all to do with the interpretation of dreams. And yet not one dramatic critic has ever given even two lines to the discussion of this most interesting fact. Dreams of being on an island, and especially of hearing beautiful and solemn music on the island, are all premonitions of some great change which is going to take place. It may not be death, hut it will bo something equally momentous. A good many men and women have dreamed this before a marriage into which they were about to enter with a heavy sense of responsibility.- So long ago ns the earliest Greek history wo see this symbolism of the island having force, in the phrase, “Isles of the Blest.” “Happy Isles,” “the Far Isles,” of early French legend and “ the Isles of the South,” of which the Greenlander dreams, when some premonition stirs in the dark recesses of his soul*