surprise one in a
dream.

I dreamed once that I was going to be hanged; but I was not at all
surprised about it. Nobody was. My relations came to see me off, I
thought, and to wish me "Good-by!" They all came, and were all very
pleasant; but they were not in the least astonished--not one of
them. Everybody appeared to regard the coming tragedy as one of the
most-naturally-to-be-expected things in the world.

They bore the calamity, besides, with an amount of stoicism that would
have done credit to a Spartan father. There was no fuss, no scene. On
the contrary, an atmosphere of mild cheerfulness prevailed.

Yet they were very kind. Somebody--an uncle, I think--left me a packet
of sandwiches and a little something in a flask, in case, as he said, I
should feel peckish on the scaffold.

It is "those twin-jailers of the daring" thought, Knowledge and
Experience, that teach us surprise. We are surprised and incredulous
when, in novels and plays, we come across good men and women, because
Knowledge and Experience have taught us how rare and problematical is
the existence of such people. In waking life, my friends and relations
would, of course, have been surprised at hearing that I had committed a
murder, and was, in consequence, about to be hanged, because Knowledge
and Experience would have taught them that, in a country where the
law is powerful and the police alert, the Christian citizen is usually
pretty successful in withstanding the voice of temptation, prompting him
to commit crime of an illegal character.

But into Dreamland, Knowledge and Experience do not enter. They stay
without, together with the dull, dead clay of which they form a part;
while the freed brain, released from their narrowing tutelage, steals
softly past the ebon gate, to wanton at its own sweet will among the
mazy paths that wind through the garden of Persephone.

Nothing that it meets with in that eternal land astonishes it because,
unfettered by the dense conviction of our waking mind, that nought
outside the ken of our own vision can in this universe be, all things
to it are possible and even probable. In dreams, we fly and wonder
not--except that we never flew before. We go naked, yet are not ashamed,
though we mildly wonder what the police are about that they do not stop
us. We converse with our dead, and think it was unkind that they did
not come back to us before. In dreams, there happens that which human
language cannot tell. In dre