Life & Wisdom Quote by Arthur Machen

Machen opens with a sly bait-and-switch: what used to be “the silly business” has, he claims, graduated into “a very serious science.” The sentence is engineered to smuggle skepticism into the room while pretending to grant legitimacy. “Now, everybody, I suppose” is the tell. It’s a parlor-room throat-clearing that flatters the reader into complicity, as if disbelief would mark you as provincial. The joke isn’t that dream divination is obviously ridiculous; it’s that modern culture can be coaxed into treating anything as sober knowledge if you dress it in the right costume.

The subtext cuts two ways. On one level, Machen is needling the era’s appetite for the occult and the newly fashionable “scientific” study of the mind. Freud and psychical research made dreams feel like evidence rather than ephemera, and Machen—who spent a career mining the uncanny—understood how easily the language of expertise can launder superstition. Calling it a “science” doesn’t prove it is one; it just changes who gets to sound confident.

On another level, he’s also protecting the power of dreams from being reduced to a ledger of symbols. Machen’s fiction thrives on the sense that the irrational can be meaningful without being measurable. By framing divination’s rise as a cultural promotion, he hints at the real horror: not that dreams might predict the future, but that modernity will institutionalize our most private mysteries, turning night-thoughts into a credentialed industry.