# Thoreau’s Dream Mountain
July 02, 2026
[ Charles M. Stang ](/people/charles-stang)
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) is typically labeled a philosopher, social reformer, scientist, and, especially, a naturalist and nature writer. But Thoreau had a wider, and weirder, understanding of nature than did many of his, or our, contemporary naturalists. He once reported hearing a voice on the vibrating telegraph wire tell him, “Bear in mind, Child, and never for an instant forget, that there are higher planes, infinitely higher planes, of life than this thou art now traveling on.”\[[1](#notes)\] He understood many, if not all, of these higher planes of life not so much as “supernatural” as, in Richard Higgins’s words, “*super* or intensely natural.”\[[2](#notes)\] We should not be surprised, then, that Thoreau was among the very few from his circle who embraced the label “Transcendentalist.”\[[3](#notes)\] He believed our present natural plane of life was transcended by other, higher planes, and that eventually even the whole of nature herself was transcended by spirit, which he also called God.
The Transcendentalist movement was centered in Concord, and largely around the person of Thoreau’s mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau is most often remembered for his 1854 book *Walden; or, Life in the Woods* and his 1849 essay, “Resistance to Civil Government,” or as it came to be called, “Civil Disobedience.” In his lifetime, Thoreau published only one other book, *A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers* (1849), but many essays and poems; when he died in 1862 at the age of 44, he left behind a great number of unfinished and unpublished writings. It has been increasingly recognized that Thoreau’s greatest literary achievement was his sprawling *Journal*, which he began in 1837 at Emerson’s suggestion and continued until just before his death. The *Journal* is filled with detailed descriptions from his daily walks (and sails along the rivers of Concord), and his philosophical reflections on self, nature, and society. It also contains records of his remarkable experiences and encounters with the more-than-human world—be they natural, super natural, or spiritual—what Alan Hodder collectively calls Thoreau’s “ecstatic witness.”\[[4](#notes)\]
This witness includes many dreams. Thoreau records some of his dreams in his *Journal*, and even some in his published work. In his first book, *A Week*, he relays a dream in which he experienced the healing of an old rift with a friend, the effect of which lasted well into his waking hours. He believes dreams are in some way veridical, “because in dreams we never deceive ourselves, nor are deceived.”\[[5](#notes)\] In this book, he is keen to explore what we can learn from how we conduct ourselves in our dreams: “Dreams are touchstones of our characters … In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake.”\[[6](#notes)\] But here and elsewhere, he is also intensely interested in the borderlands between dreams and waking life, how the one bleeds into the other. “Some dreams are divine,” he wrote, “as well as some waking thoughts."\[[7](#notes)\] For him, dreams can show us places that are real and true: “Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”\[[8](#notes)\]
Thoreau’s dream, recorded on October 29, 1857, in which he ascends and descends an imagined mountain, bears comparison with Thoreau’s other recorded dreams, but also with two experiences he had trying to summit actual mountaintops. The first is his ascent of Mt. Greylock in 1844; the second is his ascent of Mt. Katahdin in 1846. He was near the summit of Mt. Greylock when night fell in July of 1844, and he slept under a pile of boards next to the Williams College observatory. He awoke to discover that the cloud line had sunk to just below where he slept, so that he was alone with the sun above and the clouds below. He beheld an “ocean of mist,” “the new *terra firma* perchance of my future life,” an “undulating country of clouds … such a country as we might see in dreams.”\[[9](#notes)\] By contrast, the earth below was no longer visible, not *terra firma*, not even real: “\[I\]t had passed away like the phantom of a shadow, σκιᾶς ὄναρ.”\[[10](#notes)\] The Greek phrase comes from Pindar (c. 518–c. 438 BCE), an ancient Greek lyric poet, from one of his most famous lines of verse:
> ἐπάμεροι· τί δέ τις; τί δ' οὔ τις; σκιᾶς ὄναρ ἄνθρωπος.
>
> Creatures of a day! What is man? What is he not? Man is a dream of a shadow.\[[11](#notes)\]
The line is usually taken to highlight humanity’s fleeting existence. The first word, ἐπάμεροι, is a dialectical variant on ἐφήμερος, “ephemeral.” It means “living but a day” or “short-lived.” Here, Thoreau repurposes the line to refer not to man’s, but to the *earth’s* fleeting existence. At this dawn, the earth passes away like a dream we wake from, a dream of a shadow. The world he thought was solid, *terra firma*, passes away to reveal another. We have moved from Pindar to Plato: The earth becomes a flitting thing of lights and shadows—in other words, the very cave from which Plato enjoins us to ascend so that we might glimpse the sun, the *real* sun, not the fire or pretender sun in the dark cave of the famous allegory. Here we see Thoreau’s Transcendentalism—even his *Platonic* Transcendentalism—on full display.
In the excerpt below, Thoreau prefaces his dream-vision with further reflections on how dreams relate to waking reality, and the “gradual transition” from one to the other.\[[12](#notes)\] Dreams, he says, are as real as the light of the stars and the moon. He tries to locate the “early morning thoughts” he will record as lying *between* dreams and waking life: “They are a sort of permanent dream in my mind.”\[[13](#notes)\] In that liminal space, it is hard to follow his temporality. It seems as if he might have only ascended this dream mountain “once or twice.”\[[14](#notes)\] But on the morning of October 29, he recalls that ascent in a state of “permanent dream,” something he says he has experienced at least twenty times. So, there is a distinction between the dream proper (once or twice), and his subsequent access to it in the early-morning state of permanent dream (more than twenty times). It seems that he is drawing on both when he describes the dream mountain in his *Journal*. And when he puts pen to paper later in the day, he finds himself contemplating the dream-vision in his mind “as a familiar thought which I surely had for many years from time to time,” but doubts whether he has ever remembered it “in broad daylight.”\[[15](#notes)\] There is a somewhat confusing phenomenology of dreaming here, especially as it relates to time.
The dream-vision is of a mountain just to the east of Concord, “where no high hill actually is.”\[[16](#notes)\] In his dream, he ascends, shuddering, passes through a dark wood, and then crosses “an imaginary line” which separates a hill from a mountain.\[[17](#notes)\] The mountain’s summit is otherworldly: “a superterranean grandeur and sublimity,” “unhandseled, awful, grand,” walking on “bare and pathless rock, as if it were solidified air and cloud,” “far more thrillingly awful and sublime than the center of a volcano spouting fire,” “as if you trod with awe the face of a god turned up.”\[[18](#notes)\] He wonders whether there are other such dream mountains, east and west, from which you can look down from such a great height, on to Concord or indeed all the world. The dream mountain is said to be overlaid on Concord’s cemetery, the Burying-Hill (or Old Hill Burying Ground), and you enter the dark wood and ascend the mountain through this cemetery gate. This recalls the ancient Greek template of a *katabasis* or underworld journey, where the hero descends into the realm of the dead only to discover there a sky, a sun, and other stars—in other words, that his descent (*katabasis*) is in fact an ascent (*anabasis*).
In addition to its confusing temporality, the dream-vision has a strange spatiality. Thoreau ascends the mountain through the dark wood, but descends by another way, along a sunny meadow. So, while “there is another way up,” he can only find it going downhill.\[[19](#notes)\] The dream ascent is accompanied by a feeling of awe, and his “thoughts are purified and sublimed by it, as if I had been translated”—from Latin *translatus*, meaning “carried over” or “transported.”\[[20](#notes)\] He is transported to the face of the mountain, which is very face of a god: “A hard-featured god reposing, breath hangs about his forehead.”\[[21](#notes)\] His dream report ends with a cryptic comment—“I see that men may be well-mannered or conventionally polite toward men, but skeptical toward God”—perhaps suggesting that his dream-vision was a divine translation and anticipating that others will be skeptical of his report.\[[22](#notes)\] He then renders the dream-vision into a poem of rhyming couplets.
Thoreau describes this same dream mountain in a letter to his friend Harrison Blake on November 16, 1857:
> I keep a mountain anchored off eastward a little way, which I ascend in my dreams both awake and asleep. Its broad base spreads over a village or two, which does not know it; neither does it know them, nor do I when I ascend it. I can see its general outline as plainly now in my mind as that of Wachusett. I do not invent in the least, but state exactly what I see. I find that I go up it when I am light-footed and earnest. It ever smokes like an altar with its sacrifice. I am not aware that a single villager frequents it or knows of it. I keep this mountain to ride instead of a horse.\[[23](#notes)\]
There are a few interesting details here to note. First of all, Thoreau highlights the private quality of this vision: the mountain is *his* (“ I keep a mountain”) and none of his fellow villagers know of it, or it them. Second, he underscores the visionary quality of this experience (“I can see its general outline … plainly now in my mind … \[I\] state exactly what I see.” Third and finally––and this is new––the mountain is said to smoke, not like a volcano, but “like an altar with its sacrifice.” He does not tell Blake what sacrifice burns on this altar, or to what god. It could well be that the smoke is the very breath of the “hard-featured god” on whose upturned face he stands.
We should compare Thoreau’s ascent of this dream mountain to another, famous experience in which he attempted, and failed, to summit Mt. Katahdin (which he spelled “Ktaadn”) in 1846. Although the recorded dream comes years after his ascent of Katahdin, his descriptions of the two ascents resonate. The summit of the dream mountain is “awful,” “grand,” “sublime,” and, just as he will later in his account of the dream mountain, he likens his ascent to walking on the upturned face of an ancient god.\[[24](#notes)\] Repelled by clouds, wind, and rain near Katahdin’s summit, Thoreau labels this landscape similarly “savage and awful, though beautiful.”\[[25](#notes)\] He describes both mountaintops as “unhandseled,” meaning something like untouched or unbroken ground.\[[26](#notes)\] Borrowing from Hesiod’s *Theogony*, he describes on Mt. Katahdin an Earth newly born from Chaos and Old Night, a land much older than that of the Olympians. He imagines his hometown of Concord as a kinder landscape shaped by younger gods for human habitation. Here in the heights, by contrast, he encounters “a force not bound to be kind to man,” a force he labels “Matter, vast, terrific,” and likens to a Titan.\[[27](#notes)\] This Matter is not “Mother Earth” but something even more primordial, the home of Necessity and Fate, twin powers to which even the gods must bend the knee.\[[28](#notes)\] His encounter with this Matter prompts the following famous reverie: “What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the *solid* earth! the *actual* world! the *common sense*! *Contact*! *Contact*! *Who* are we? *where* are we?”\[[29](#notes)\] Paradoxically, his mountaintop encounter with Matter brings him back to the miracle of our daily contact and communion with matter. Titanic Matter condescends to meet us as quotidian rocks, trees, wind. If we perceive these with our common sense, if we have this matter in common with Matter, then indeed we are the Titan’s kin: like the summit, dream or actual, there is part of us that is always unhandseled. Just as Matter is not far away on some distant mountaintop, but close at hand, so too the mountaintop is not far away in Maine, but nearby, next door even, lying atop Concord’s cemetery.
Finally, Thoreau’s dream mountain is significant because it exemplifies the distinction he often makes between the “actual” and the “ideal.”\[[30](#notes)\] We are accustomed to thinking that an “actual” mountain—like Greylock or Katahdin—is the “real” one, but Thoreau turns this upside down. For him, as for any Platonist, the ideal—what he will also call the “spiritual”—is *more* real than the actual. We often stand astride the two, and can see one or the other, or both: “On one side of man is the actual, and on the other the ideal.”\[[31](#notes)\] But to see the ideal or spiritual dimension requires a paradoxically lazy effort: “We must look on the world with a drowsy and half-shut eye, that it may not be too much in our eye, and rather stand aloof from than within it. When we are awake to the real world, we are asleep to the actual.”\[32\]
Thoreau concedes that there is no actual mountain next to Concord. But there is an ideal one there, one that sits at the borders of dreams and waking thoughts. This ideal landscape, and others like it, I have taken to calling “imaginal,” a term I borrow from Henry Corbin, who coined it to describe a realm or realms that exceed our commonplace sense perception, very much like the “higher planes” of which the voice in the telegraph wire spoke to Thoreau.\[[33](#notes)\] According to Corbin, we gain access to these realms by using our faculty of imagination, which he insists is a veridical and visionary faculty of perception. In a letter to Harrison Blake from September of 1852, Thoreau wrote of the imagination that it “never forgets; it is a re-membering. It is not foundationless, but most reasonable, and it alone uses all the knowledge of the intellect.”\[[34](#notes)\] Likewise for Corbin, the imaginal realm, or *mundus imaginalis*, is decidedly *not* “imaginary”; like Thoreau’s ideal landscape, the imaginal realm is more real “than this thou art now traveling on”—to quote the voice on the wire again. As he says to Blake in his letter describing the dream mountain: “I do not invent in the least, but state exactly what I see.”\[[35](#notes)\] The imaginal realm is porous with our everyday world, and we can see it and its inhabitants if we can but learn how to recover the power of vision. “Why not see,—use our eyes?” Thoreau asks.\[[36](#notes)\] Throughout his writings, and especially in his *Journal*, Thoreau reports moving in and out of what I, following Corbin, would call imaginal realms, both in dreams and in waking, and often somewhere in between. Just as Thoreau’s “nature” includes the super natural and abuts spirit, so too his natural landscapes often include imaginal realms and abut other worlds. The genius of Thoreau is that his attention to the imaginal does not come at the cost of the actual world: he attends more carefully than nearly anyone to close, detailed observation of this plane of life, and often it seems as if his concentrated contemplation of what is before his eyes, the “here and now” (*hic et nunc*), is what opens a window or a portal to something, someone, or somewhere else. Thoreau’s visionary practice, then, is to let actual landscapes become ideal, imaginal landscapes, and his writerly practice is to render that transformation into words. Anyone with eyes can see a mountaintop, or the view from a summit. But not everyone can let that actual summit shine with an imaginal light; not everyone can see it, nor put it in words. Or rather: Everyone *can*, but they don’t. This kind of vision is our common sense that has become sadly so uncommon.
## Source
October 29, 1857\[[37](#notes)\]
> \[…\]
>
> There are some things of which I cannot at once tell whether I have dreamed them or they are real; as if they were just, perchance, establishing, or else, losing, a real basis in my world. This is especially the case in the early morning hours, when there is a gradual transition from dreams to waking thoughts, from illusions to actualities, as from darkness, or perchance moon and star light, to sunlight. Dreams are real, as is the light of the stars and moon, and theirs is said to be a *dreamy* light. Such early morning thoughts as I speak of occupy a debatable ground between dreams and waking thoughts. They are a sort of permanent dream in my mind. At least, until we have for some time changed our position from prostrate to erect, we cannot tell what we have dreamed from what we have actually experienced.
>
> This morning, for instance, for the twentieth time at least, I thought of that mountain in the easterly part of our town (where no high hill actually is) which once or twice I had ascended, and often allowed my thoughts alone to climb. I now contemplate it in my mind as a familiar thought which I surely had for many years from time to time, but whether anything could have reminded me of it in the middle of yesterday, whether I ever before remembered it in broad daylight, I doubt. I can now eke out the vision of it this morning with my old and yesterday forgotten dreams.
>
> My way up used to lie through a dark and unfrequented wood at its base,—I cannot tell exactly, it was so long ago under what circumstances I first ascended, only that I shuddered as I went along (I have an indistinct remembrance of having been out overnight alone),—and then I steadily ascended along a rocky ridge half clad with stinted trees, where wild beasts haunted, till I lost myself quite in the upper air and clouds, seeming to pass an imaginary line which separates a hill, mere earth heaped up, from a mountain, into a superterranean grandeur and sublimity. What distinguishes that summit above the earthly line, is that it is unhandselled, awful, grand. It can never become familiar; you are lost the moment you set foot there. You know no path, but wander, thrilled, over the bare and pathless rock, as if it were solidified air and cloud. That rocky, misty summit, secreted in the clouds, was far more thrillingly awful and sublime than the center of a volcano spouting fire.
>
> This is a business we can partly understand. The perfect mountain height is already thoroughly purified. It is as if you trod with awe the face of a god turned up, unwittingly but helplessly, yielding to the laws of gravity. And are there not such mountains, east or west, from which you may look down on Concord in your thought, and on all the world? In dreams I am shown this height from time to time, and I seem to have asked my fellow once to climb there with me, and yet I am constrained to believe that I never actually ascended it. It chances, now I think of it, that it rises in my mind where lies the Burying-Hill. You might go through its gate to enter that dark wood, but that hill and its graves are so concealed and obliterated by the awful mountain that I never thought of them as underlying it. Might not the graveyards of the just always be hills, ways by which we ascend and overlook the plain?
>
> But my old way down was different, and, indeed, this was another way up, though I never so ascended. I came out, as I descended, breathing the thicker air. I came out the belt of wood into a familiar pasture, and along down by a wall. Often, as I go along the low side of this pasture, I let my thoughts ascend toward the mount, gradually entering the stinted wood (Nature subdued) and the thinner air, and drape themselves with mists. There are ever two ways up: one is through the dark wood, the other through the sunny pasture. That is, I reach out and discover the mountain only through the dark wood, but I see to my surprise, when I look off between the mists from its summit, how it is ever adjacent to my native fields, nay, imminent over them, and accessible through a sunny pasture. Why is it that in the lives of men we hear more of the dark wood than of the sunny pasture?
>
> A hard-featured god reposing, breath hangs about his forehead.
>
> Though the pleasure of ascending the mountain is largely mixed with awe, my thoughts are purified and sublimed by it, as if I had been translated.
>
> I see that men may be well-mannered or conventionally polite toward men, but skeptical toward God.
>
> Forever in my dream and in my morning thought,
>
> Eastward a mountain ascends;
>
> But when in the sunbeam its hard outline is sought,
>
> It all dissolves and ends.
>
> The woods that way are gates, the pastures too slope up
>
> To an unearthly ground;
>
> But when I ask my mates to take the staff and cup,
>
> It can no more be found.
>
> Perhaps I have no shoes fit for the lofty soil
>
> Where my thoughts graze,
>
> No properly spun clues, nor well-strained mid-day oil,
>
> Or must I mend my ways?
>
> It is a promised land which I have not yet earned.
>
> I have not made beginning
>
> With consecrated hand, nor have I ever learned
>
> To lay the underpinning.
>
> The mountain sinks by day, as do my lofty thoughts,
>
> Because I’m not high-minded.
>
> If I could think always above these hills and wards,
>
> I should see it, though blinded.
>
> It is a spiral path within the pilgrim’s soul
>
> Leads to this mountain’s brow;
>
> Commencing at his hearth he climbs up to this goal
>
> He knows not when nor how.
## Notes
\[1\] Henry David Thoreau, “September 12, 1851,” in *The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journal*, ed. Bradford Torrey, vol. II 1850–September 15, 1851: 497. All references to Thoreau’s writings are from the 1906 edition of *The Writings of Henry David Thoreau*, 20 vol. (Houghton and Mifflin and Company), available at The Walden Woods Project: .
\[2\] Richard Higgins, *Thoreau’s God* (University of Chicago Press, 2024), 2.
\[3\] Lawrence Buell, *Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently* (Oxford University Press, 2023), 50–51.
\[4\] Alan D. Hodder, *Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness* (Yale University Press, 2001).
\[5\] Thoreau, “Wednesday,” in *A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers*, vol. 1 of *The Writings of Henry David Thoreau*, 315.
\[6\] Ibid.
\[7\] Ibid.
\[8\] Ibid., 316.
\[9\] Thoreau, “Tuesday,” in *A Week*, 197–98.
\[10\] Ibid., 198.
\[11\] *Pythian Odes* 8.95 (translation my own). Greek text from H. Maehler, ed., *Pindari carmina cum fragmentis*, 5th ed. (Teubner, 1971).
\[12\] Thoreau, “October 29, 1857,” in *Journal*, vol. X August 8, 1857–June 29, 1858: 141.
\[13\] Ibid.
\[14\] Ibid.
\[15\] Ibid.
\[16\] Ibid.
\[17\] Ibid., 142.
\[18\] Ibid.
\[19\] Ibid., 143.
\[20\] Ibid., 144.
\[21\] Ibid.
\[22\] Ibid.
\[23\] Thoreau, *Letters to a Spiritual Seeker* (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 159.
\[24\] Thoreau, “October 29, 1857,” in *Journal*, vol. X: 142.
\[25\] Thoreau, *The Maine Woods*, vol. 3 of *The Writings of Henry David Thoreau*, 77.
\[26\] Thoreau, “October 29, 1857,” in *Journal*, vol. X: 142; Thoreau, *Maine Woods*, 78.
\[27\] Thoreau, *Maine Woods*, 78.
\[28\] Ibid.
\[29\] Ibid., 79.
\[30\] See Higgins, *Thoreau’s God*, 53–54.
\[31\] Thoreau, “April 3, 1842,” in *Journal*, vol. I 1837–1846: 360.
\[32\] Thoreau, “March 7–10 1841,” in *Journal*, vol. I: 229.
\[33\] Henry Corbin, “*Mundus Imaginalis*, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal,” Les amis de Henry & Stella Corbin, .
\[34\] Thoreau, *Letters to a Spiritual Seeker*, 72.
\[35\] Ibid., 159.
\[36\] Ibid., 36.
\[37\] Thoreau, *Journal*, vol. X: 141–44.
## Bibliography
Buell, Lawrence. *Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently*. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
Corbin, Henry. “*Mundus Imaginalis*, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal.” Les amis de Henry & Stella Corbin. Accessed June 13, 2026, .
Higgins, Richard. *Thoreau’s God*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024.
Hodder, Alan D. *Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness*. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
Maehler, H., ed. *Pindari carmina cum fragmentis*. 5th ed. Leipzig: Teubner, 1971.
Stang, Charles M. “Thoreau’s gods.” *Harvard Divinity Bulletin* Spring/Summer 2026, 66–71.
Thoreau, Henry David. *The Writings of Henry David Thoreau*. 20 volumes. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1906.
———. “Resistance to Civil Government.” In *Aesthetic Papers*, edited by Elizabeth Peabody, 189–213. Boston: G. P. Putnam, 1849.
———. *Letters to a Spiritual Seeker*. Edited by Brad Dean. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.
Author Biography
### Charles M. Stang
Charles Stang joined the Faculty of Divinity in 2008. His research and teaching focus on Christianity in late antiquity and, more broadly, philosophy and religion in the ancient Mediterranean world.
His recent books include *Theosophy and the Study of Religion* (Brill, 2024), *The Gnostic Trilogy of Evagrius Ponticus* (Oxford University Press, 2023), and *Invitation to Syriac Christianity: An Anthology* (University of California Press, 2022). His first monograph, *Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: "No Longer I"* (Oxford University Press, 2012), won the Manfred Lautenschläger Award for Theological Promise in 2013. His second monograph, *Our Divine Double*, was published in 2016 by Harvard University Press.
Stang's current projects include a book on daemons in ancient philosophy, translations of both Evagrius Ponticus’ *Letter to Melania* and Henry Corbin’s *Le paradoxe du monothéisme*, and an edited volume on “Platonism as a Living Tradition.”
In 2017, he became the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at HDS.
See also:- [ Archive of Mystical Experiences ](/topic-tags/archive-mystical-experiences)