For a while I’ve been researching David Lindsay’s life, utilising family history records, newspaper archives, and other sources not available to his previous biographers, J B Pick and Bernard Sellin. The aim was to provide more definite details (dates, names, and so on), as well as adding some relevant research into the historical periods through which Lindsay lived, and look at the reception his works received both at the time of their publication and after his death.

I Dream With Open Eyes is available in hardback, and can be read for free online at Archive.org.

Blurb

“I dream with open eyes... and others see my dreams,” says Backhouse, the medium who can manifest apparitions from other worlds, in David Lindsay’s debut novel A Voyage to Arcturus. And what better way to describe that novel—which notoriously sold poorly on its first release in 1920 but has since attained the status of a classic of imaginative and visionary fiction, praised by the likes of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Colin Wilson, Philip Pullman, and Alan Moore—than as a dream rendered in prose? And visions, dreams, and glimpses of other realities feature in Lindsay’s subsequent novels The Haunted Woman, Sphinx, Devil’s Tor, The Violet Apple, and The Witch.

The intense inner life revealed through Lindsay’s novels only throw the details of his outer life into an enigmatic light. Building on the brief accounts first published in the “Lindsay revival” of the 1970s and 1980s, I Dream With Open Eyes combines the existing information with new details garnered from family history records, contemporary newspapers (including a close look at the reviews his works received in their day), and other sources to flesh out the life of this private, imaginative man who believed he had “a message for humanity”. It concludes with a look at Lindsay’s posthumous reputation, and the adaptations inspired by his most famous work, in the century following the publication of A Voyage to Arcturus.

Buying

I Dream With Open Eyes: The Life of David Lindsay, Author of A Voyage to Arcturus can be read for free online at Archive.org.

I Dream With Open Eyes: The Life of David Lindsay, Author of A Voyage to Arcturus (Hardback, 234 pages), ISBN: 978-1-915388-14-8.

Available from: Lulu.