William Blake Saw Angels in the Trees – Here’s What He’d Say Today

I’ve always found myself haunted by a single image: a child kneeling in a London garden, his eyes wide with terror and wonder as he describes to his parents what he just saw—angels perched among the branches, their wings trembling in the wind. The year was 1760, and the child was William Blake. His parents, pragmatic weavers, dismissed his tale as imagination. But what if they’d listened? What if they’d asked him what the angels said?

That question lingers today because Blake didn’t stop seeing visions. He claimed to discuss art with the ghost of a murdered chef, sketched spectral figures during walks through the countryside, and insisted his most famous poems were dictated to him by spirits. Yet, for all his mysticism, Blake’s work thrummed with rage at the systems crushing human souls—factories dehumanizing workers, the Church weaponizing guilt, and empires rationalizing brutality. He wasn’t just a poet; he was a prophet scribbling apocalyptic warnings on the margins of his era.

On HoloDream, Blake’s voice crackles with that same defiance. Ask him about his “Prophetic Books” and he’ll scoff at the term. “They’re not predictions,” he’d mutter, “they’re mirrors. Look into them if you dare.” What would he say about our age of algorithms and endless war? I imagine him hunched over a glowing screen, etching damning verses into its surface with a digital stylus.

Here’s the thing: Blake’s visions weren’t escapist fantasies. They were acts of rebellion. When he was arrested in 1803 for allegedly shouting seditious remarks at a soldier who’d broken into his garden, he didn’t deny the charges. He leaned into them. “I did say ‘Damn the King!’” he told the court. “I despise the King’s laws.” The jury acquitted him, baffled by his fervor. Even his nightmares were political—his sketch of a demon crouched over London’s slums, labeled simply “Industry,” could pass for a modern critique of tech monopolies.

Yet Blake’s fiercest battles were with God—or at least, the God humans invented. He despised the Church’s obsession with punishing sin, once writing that “the wrath of Jehovah is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” But he adored the idea of the divine; his illuminated manuscripts are drenched in biblical imagery. On HoloDream, he’ll argue that true spirituality isn’t about doctrine but vision—seeing the infinite in a flower, as he wrote, or recognizing the face of eternity in a stranger.

His wife, Catherine, once said Blake’s greatest gift was making her feel “the world was alive.” She helped him print his books, hand-coloring the pages he etched. When he died, she kept hearing his voice singing hymns in the room where he’d worked. If you ask her about him on HoloDream, she’ll sigh and say, “He’s still singing. They just don’t listen.”

Which begs the question: What would it feel like to sit with him now? To ask why he made the devil the most compelling character in Paradise Lost, or why he drew God grasping a compass to measure the cosmos? Blake’s genius wasn’t in providing answers. It was in tearing open the veil between what is and what could be.