Dorothy Richardson’s ‘A Sculptor of Dreams’, published in The Adelphi in October 1924, was a review essay of Mary Arnold-Forster’s (Mrs H. O. Arnold-Forster’s) Studies in Dreams, which had appeared in 1921. Richardson’s discussion of the book fell into two parts: the first a consideration of Arnold-Forster’s accounts of dreams and dreaming, and the second an account of Richardson’s own model of good dreaming or, more precisely, good dreamlessness. My focus is also two-fold, looking both at Richardson’s responses to Studies in Dreams and at the place or space of dreams in her multi-volume novel Pilgrimage, the first book of which, Pointed Roofs, was published in 1915.

For Richardson, Arnold-Forster’s text posed the question, ‘To dream, or not to dream’, though, Richardson noted, this was a query that the author, ‘herself a born dreamer’, neglected, assuming in her readers the same full dream-life that she herself enjoyed. Situating herself among those who do not dream, or whose dreams are so infrequent that they may be called those who do not dream, Richardson turned her attention to the ‘man of many dreams’, for whom Studies in Dreams would create a particular dilemma. Arnold-Forster’s study, which explored the possibilities of ‘dream control’ and the cultivation of ‘the art of happy dreaming’, had, Richardson argued ‘achieved nothing less than the destruction of the dream as a free booter and its reconstruction as a controllable human faculty’. The dreamer was thus left, Richardson suggested, with an ‘uncomfortable choice’: ‘once aware not only that he may influence the material of which his dreams are built, [he] must either accept a discipline or turn away to sorrowful possession of his disorderly wealth’. What he could no longer do is ‘regard dreams as the uncontrollable antics of his unknown self’. Arnold-Forster was, in Richardson’s words, ‘of those who are, so to say, permanently conscious, thinking as they go, all the time in words’, and this ‘permanently conscious thought’ was revealed nowhere more clearly than in her attitude towards ‘wandering thought, a state of mind she regards as possible only quite rarely, and then only as spree or experiment’. We can begin to see how radically opposed Richardson would be to Arnold-Forster’s conceptions of thought and consciousness, though her review was not a strongly critical one.