bout
the room. My full consciousness of time and place returned, and I saw
nothing unusual about my apartment; there were the books, the chairs,
and even the table, standing in motionless silence as usual. I concluded
that my late hours and excessive concentration on my studies had made me
nervous, or else that I had had a dream. I closed the book and prepared
to go to bed. Like school-boy whistling to keep his courage up, I began
to talk aloud, saying: "I wish Copernicus would really come and carry me
off to explore the solar system; I fancy that I could make a better
report than Andrew Jackson Davis has done."

I tremble even now as I recall the instantaneous effect of those words.
While I was still speaking, all earthly things vanished suddenly from my
sight. There was no floor beneath me, no ceiling above, no walls around.
There was even no earth below me, and no sky above. Look where I would,
nothing was visible but my own body. My clothing shone with a pale blue
light, by which I could peer into the surrounding darkness to the
distance, as I should judge, of about twenty or thirty feet. I was
apparently hanging, like a planet, in mid-ether, resting upon nothing.
Horrible amazement seized me, as the conviction flashed through me like
an electric shock that I must have lost my reason. In a few moments,
however, this terror subsided; I felt certain that my thoughts were
rational, and concluded that it was some affection of the optic nerve.
But in a very few seconds I discovered by internal sensations that I was
in motion, in a rapid, irregular, and accelerating motion. Awful horror
again seized me; I screamed out a despairing cry for help, and fainted.

When I recovered from the swoon, I found myself lying on a grassy bank
near a sea-shore, with strange trees waving over me. The sun was
apparently an hour high. I was dressed as on the preceding evening,
without a hat. The air was deliciously mild, the landscape before me
lovely and grand. I said to myself: "This is a beautiful dream; it must
be a dream." But it was too real, and I said, "Can it be that I am
asleep?" I pinched my arms, I went to the sea and dipped my head in the
waters,--'t was in vain; I could not awake myself, because I was already
awake.

"No!" I replied, "you are not awake." Do you not remember that saying of
Engel, that when men dream of asking whether they are awake, they always
dream that they answer yes? But I said, I will apply two tests of