![Emerald green artwork](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2026-07/emeralddetail1%20%281%29.jpg?itok=AzLx_QGp) # Thoreau's Dream Mountain August 06, 2026 [ Charles M. Stang ](/people/charles-stang) Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) is often remembered today as a naturalist and nature writer. But he 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.”\[1\] He understood many, if not all, of these higher planes of life not so much “supernatural” as, in Richard Higgins words, “*super* or intensely natural.”\[2\] We should not be surprised, then, that Thoreau was among the very few from his circle who embraced the label “Transcendentalist.”\[3\] 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. In our dreams we regularly, nightly in fact, transcend our everyday perception of this plane of life, just as the circle dreamed of a sphere in Edwin A. Abbot’s 1884 novel, *Flatland*, and so escaped, however briefly, his two dimensions for three.\[4\] In a journal entry dated October 29, 1857, Thoreau describes a dream in which he ascends and descends a mountain just to the east of Concord, “where no high hill actually is.”\[5\] Thoreau prefaces his dream-vision with reflections on how dreams relate to waking reality, and the “gradual transition” from one to the other.\[6\] Dreams, he says, are as real as the light of the stars and the moon. He locates the “early morning thoughts” he will record in his journal as lying *between* dreams and waking life: “They are a sort of permanent dream in my mind.”\[7\] In that liminal space, it is hard to follow his experience of time. It seems as if he might have only ascended this dream mountain “once or twice.”\[8\] But on that October morning, he recalls the ascent in a state of “permanent dream,” something he says he has experienced at least twenty times.\[9\] 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.”\[10\] In his dream-vision, he ascends the mountain, shuddering, passes through a dark wood, and then crosses “an imaginary line” which separates a hill from the mountain proper.\[11\] 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.”\[12\] He wonders whether there are other such dream mountains, east or west, from which you can look down from such a great height, on to Concord or indeed all the world. The dream mountain lays atop Concord’s cemetery, the Burying-Hill, and Thoreau enters the dark wood and ascends the mountain through this cemetery gate. This recalls the ancient Greek template of the *katabasis* or underworld journey, where the hero descends in 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 *Skywater*, the book I am writing with Sarah Schorr, we are exploring a similar paradox, how Thoreau contemplates in the waters’ depths a night sky of stars, and so ascends by descending. Just as the ancient Greek philosopher Thales famously fell into a well while gazing at the stars, because, as his fellow philosopher and near contemporary Heraclitus put it so pithily, “The way up and way down are one and the same.”\[13\] 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.\[14\] The 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.”\[15\] 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 vision was a divine transportation and anticipating that others will be skeptical of his report.\[16\] Thoreau’s dream mountain exemplifies the distinction he often makes between the “actual” and the “ideal.”\[17\] We are accustomed to thinking that an “actual” mountain 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.”\[18\] But to see the ideal or spiritual dimension requires a paradoxically lazy effort, a kind of energetic rest: “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.”\[19\] While there is no actual mountain next to Concord, the ideal one there 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 uses 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.\[20\] 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 his friend Harrison Blake from September of 1852, Thoreau wrote of the imagination that it “is not foundationless, but most reasonable, and it alone uses all the knowledge of the intellect.”\[21\] Likewise for Corbin, the imaginal realm, or *mundus imaginalis*, is decidedly *not* “imaginary”; like Thoreau’s ideal landscape, Corbin’s imaginal realm is more real “than this thou are now traveling on” – to quote the voice on the wire again. 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.\[22\] 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 try 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 or ideal light; not everyone can see it, nor put it in words. Or rather: perhaps everyone *can*, but they don’t. This kind of vision is our common sense that has become sadly so uncommon. ## References NB: A longer version of this will appear in Matthew J. Dillon (ed), *The Varieties of Mystical Experience*, forthcoming from the Center for the Study of World Religions in 2026. \[1\] Henry David Thoreau, *Journal*, Sept. 12, 1851, II: 497. All references to Thoreau’s writings are from the 1906 edition of *The Writings of Henry David Thoreau*, available at The Walden Woods Project: [https://www.walden.org/work/the-writings-of-henrydavid-thoreau/](https://www.walden.org/work/the-writings-of-henrydavid-thoreau/) \[2\] 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. \[4\] Edwin A. Abbott, *The Annotated Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions*, introduction and notes by Ian Stewart (Basic Books, 2008). See Charles M. Stang, “The Dream of the Sphere: A Dispatch from the Flatland,” *Tank Magazine* 94 (Spring 2023). \[5\] Thoreau, *Journal,* October 29, 1857, X: 141. \[6\] Ibid. \[7\] Ibid. \[8\] Ibid. \[9\] Ibid. \[10\] Ibid. \[11\] Ibid., X: 142. \[12\] Ibid. \[13\] Heraclitus, fragment 60 (my translation). \[14\] Thoreau, *Journal*, October 29, 1857. \[15\] Ibid., X: 144. \[16\] Ibid. \[17\] See Higgins, *Thoreau’s God*, 53-54. \[18\] Thoreau, *Journal*, April 3, 1842, I: 360. \[19\] Thoreau, *Journal*, March 7-10, 1841, I: 229. \[20\] Henry Corbin, “Mundus Imaginalis, or Imaginary and the Imaginal,” www. amiscorbin.com. \[21\] Henry David Thoreau, *Letters to a Spiritual Seeker* (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 72. \[22\] Ibid., 36.