Dreaming To Some purpose
Colin Wilson.
Arrow Books. 402 Pages.

I met Colin Wilson in the flesh in 1987 at Webster’s Book Store on Downer Street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was a pleasant man who spoke to good effect without notes. He talked about the ability of mere mortals to connect with something higher than themselves (located fashionably enough in the right or left brain–I forget which) while a strange man sat in lotus position on a nearby chair practicing conscious breathing techniques for all to wonder at. Mr. Wilson generously talked around this example of spiritual exhibitionism, and was warmly applauded at the end.

I liked the guy. I had read just about everything of the non-fiction variety that he’d written and was impressed. However, I’d noticed that with each book Mr. Wilson seemed to allow himself to wade farther and farther into the irrational side of the pool. Not that that was a bad thing, I guess, but I really began to suspect that Colin Wilson was taking the easy way–and perhaps the most profitable way–out when he ended his book on Poltergeists by declaring his belief in evil spirits. I wondered how the existence of mind-bending, dharma destroying phantoms squared with his philosophy of enlightenment by communing with the higher, mystical levels of the self. Couldn’t it just be possible that these visions and feelings of connectedness that Mr. Wilson seemed to be able to enter at will were illusions created by the malign influence of an evil spirit? How could one be sure of any positive inward experience once one began to see the self as a possible target of demonic attack?

I asked Mr. Wison about this and he seemed a little taken aback–and in fact positively nervous. He gave me some half-hearted answer and I asked if I could correspond with him and he said of course, and gave me his address. What I didn’t suspect was that a schizophrenic woman who had earlier attempted to seduce (and eventually did) the gentleman before me, was probably in attendance at that very lecture with her boyfriend. In fact, this same woman would eventually kill herself two years later. All of this is set out in Colin Wilson’s autobiography Dreaming To Some Purpose, which proceeds like a slow-screen bio-picture, with Colin meshed in the coils of the flesh (and loving it!) hustling some book idea, lecturing Albert Camus about existentialism in bad French, and stepping forward to tell us any number of mechanical analogies for the human psyche, likening it sometimes to an airpump, and sometimes to pool balls that arrange themselves as if by magic into an entropy-defying structure! Moreover, As we read this book, we get the feeling that Mr. Wilson must have been paid by the word, because there’s an awful lot of padding taken from his other books, as well as repetitions of Wilson’s pet ideas. Still, the literary gossip is good, and some of the information is of interest. (What I like best is when Colin Wilson initially dismisses a subject–like UFO’s–and then suddenly understands the importance of it, and its exact place in his system, once he makes a lucretive book deal about it.)

The beginning of the book is great fun, the middle begins to bog down, and this is where Mr. Wilson really begins to repeat himself, and the ending is jarring. Still, it’s a good read and I thank him for it, and for his other thought-provoking productions. Long life and good health to Colin Wilson!

Which brings up one more small point: With our 21st century understaning of the physiology of human consciousness expanding as it is, I wonder how much of what Colin Wilson explains as mystical states of being could be, in fact, pathological in origin. Many of these states that Wilson describes himself entering sound suspiciously like small epileptic seizures, or minor cardio-vascular infarctions.