rack its flight and bring us knowledge of the distant, shadowy country
that we nightly visit. When we come back from the dream-realm, we can
give no reasonable report of what we met there. But once across the
border, we feel at home as if we had always lived there and had never
made any excursions into this rational daylight world.

My dreams do not seem to differ very much from the dreams of other
people. Some of them are coherent and safely hitched to an event or a
conclusion. Others are inconsequent and fantastic. All attest that in
Dreamland there is no such thing as repose. We are always up and doing
with a mind for any adventure. We act, strive, think, suffer and are
glad to no purpose. We leave outside the portals of Sleep all
troublesome incredulities and vexatious speculations as to probability.
I float wraith-like upon clouds in and out among the winds, without the
faintest notion that I am doing anything unusual. In Dreamland I find
little that is altogether strange or wholly new to my experience. No
matter what happens, I am not astonished, however extraordinary the
circumstances may be. I visit a foreign land where I have not been in
reality, and I converse with peoples whose language I have never heard.
Yet we manage to understand each other perfectly. Into whatsoever
situation or society my wanderings bring me, there is the same
homogeneity. If I happen into Vagabondia, I make merry with the jolly
folk of the road or the tavern.

I do not remember ever to have met persons with whom I could not at once
communicate, or to have been shocked or surprised at the doings of my
dream-companions. In its strange wanderings in those dusky groves of
Slumberland my soul takes everything for granted and adapts itself to
the wildest phantoms. I am seldom confused. Everything is as clear as
day. I know events the instant they take place, and wherever I turn my
steps, Mind is my faithful guide and interpreter.

I suppose every one has had in a dream the exasperating, profitless
experience of seeking something urgently desired at the moment, and the
aching, weary sensation that follows each failure to track the thing to
its hiding-place. Sometimes with a singing dizziness in my head I climb
and climb, I know not where or why. Yet I cannot quit the torturing,
passionate endeavour, though again and again I reach out blindly for an
object to hold to. Of course according to the perversity of dreams there
is no object near. I