[mindil]

I never made a list - this was an idea that evolved as I was reading HoME and HotH. "Reality theory" seemed clear-cut before I ever read Lost Road or Notion Club Papers. In fact, it was fascinating to see Ramer confirming all my previous speculations about how Tolkien's dreams must have worked.

My own thought process went like this. I asked myself: Where did all Tolkien's material come from? Was it all concocted or might any of it have "really happened," they way he kept saying that he was recording what really happened? Well, for starters, the Red Book story was a clearcut fabrication. If he were working from a written text, it wouldn't have the sort of false starts that HoME documents. Even if a written text had had fragments and multiple versions, they wouldn't have allowed for drafts that looked like his at all.

Similarly, he could not have witnessed the whole story directly - again, his drafts would have looked very different had he done that. So what did his drafts look like? Like a person who had listened to the story, not read or seen it. And like a person who had listened to it in fragments, and in many different versions. But additionally, his story was interspersed with very vivid, sporadic visual depictions. Sometimes they came after a long struggle with different versions, and sometimes they preceded a struggle with different versions. And always, these strong visuals were random, and not always the most helpful to resolving the narrative dilemmas he was struggling with. So if he was able, on occasion, to actually experience parts of his story, he clearly couldn't visit that vision often or long enough to conclusively pin down whatever information he needed. And if that were true, he would know this limitation, and would therefore be very judicious in using his capacity to enter into his story. He would purposely choose to listen to tales told about his story, because he could listen to a story being retold as often as it was retold. And this fits very well with his primary interest in mythology, which was always oral and was always a matter of variations in retelling.

So I guessed that when it came to Middle Earth, somehow he had gotten into the habit of tuning into it as an Alternate Universe and listening for tales and using those tales to build his mythology. And with his penchant for authenticity, he preferred to get as much of the story of Arda right as he could, before editing and adding to suit his this-worldly audiences.

What I looked for, then, wasn't statements of dreams, but statements of hearing stories, and the first thing I noticed was that he constantly described Elvish as a language that was understood by the mind even without understanding the words. He even described Rohirrish as a language the hobbits intuited. This fit so well with his drafts of his languages and names, that it was clearly an autobiographical statement. He couldn't have rewritten his elvish poems and names so heavily from draft to draft if he had been able to remember the actual words (or if he had simply invented them without there being some external model he was trying to match). It must have been that he remembered the import of what was said, and then had to reconstruct the words to fit it.

This, then, fit perfectly with the Cottage of Lost Play and the Way of Dreams - there he listened to the First Age stories. His life in Sarehole wandering freely in the fields provided the perfect opportunity to wander into Elfland, as he recorded many children doing. And later, living in foster homes, he spend so much time in his rooms "working on his languages," he likely had started to learn how to continue to visit Tol Eressea - which I assumed was through some sort of trance state. But what seemed probably was that in these trances, he continued to listen to stories, not see them.

I think he started to visit Arda visually mostly with the writing of the Hobbit. As I was going through the HotH, I took notes about what seemed like it had been heard, and what seemed like it had been seen. Most was heard, but some was seen. And lots was concocted. The difference was apparent by a literary analysis (I've taught literature) of the drafts, which I don't recall by heart, but can find if I dig up my old notes.

At any rate, the Legendarium is chock full of people telling stories - in pubs, in halls of fire, around campfires, in parlors - this is self-evident. The drafts show which bits were heard conclusively enough not to need revision and which were not, and which bits were gaps that he filled in himself, or were changes he made to help the story. Often the drafts will say, "No, it was X," but sometimes they say, "Make X into Y." This is significant, as are many other indications.

So the actual visions of the narrative were few, but the collection of information from Arda itself is massive - I'd guess about half the story. And the confecting was much greater for Hobbit and LotR, which were being published for a lay public, while the Silmarillion material was adjusted pretty much only to fill in gaps or reconcile different versions. He might have played with it for publication had he ever gotten so far.

In my original post(s), I started with the LR/NCP dream ideas, because they confirm that Tolkien indeed had AU experiences (real or imagined) of exactly the nature that his writing leads one to expect. But the interesting thing is to follow where the writing actually leads, to see what might have really happened.

His mentioning dreams in LotR does not necessarily reflect the dreams he himself might actually have had. Rather they reflect his experience that dreams of that sort are extremely significant and that such dreams tend to reflect reality. So I wouldn't equate your list of dreams with experiences he had in/of Arda - though of course they might be. I'd figure it out by literary analysis of the drafts. Which I hope to start doing in another day or three, if there's enough interest.