First published in 1946 just after the war, this book is a collection of dreams and visions from the 1930s to the 40s. Beginning with the dreams and imaginings of peasants, it becomes ever more visionary in its depictions of struggles with death and fear but also more and more concrete, ending with the reality of pain. Saurat takes us into a world that is below the surface of both religions and what is rational. Death and the Dreamer is a companion volume to his Gods of the People. C. S. Nott spoke of “Saurat, a son of peasants, had a deep understanding of the rich current of life that, flowing under the glittering exterior, has almost nothing in common with this exterior—I mean the life of simple people, peasants and the middle classes who themselves are almost unconscious of it. “ Denis Saurat lived in England during the war and was friends with A. R Orage and C. S. Nott, both pupils of Gurdjieff, whom he much admired. He says, in his Preliminary Note to the “. . . we understand only after the event, in spite of the innumerable pointers of destiny; for the whole world holds together from the inside, but we place ourselves outside to look at it.”

It was a companion volume to Gods of the People, published in 1947. We show extracts only from this book on our website because much of is in French. It begins with the author reporting how he was listening to a preacher at Speakers Corner in London and discovered a whole world of belief embedded in uneducated people quite different from that of known writers, which formed a vast underground current of ideas but which surfaced occasionally in such works as the poetry of William Blake or Spenser. Saurat includes extracts from what he calls the Twentieth Century Manuscript, a document he found amongst believers in the hidden gods.