by a deep boding, a dull ache of the mind, which charged
everything that I saw with a sense of fortuitous dismay. I woke in that
painful mood in which the mind is filled with a formless dread; and the
sensation has hung about me, more or less, all day.

What a strange phenomenon it is that the sick mind should be able thus
to paint its diseased fancies in the dark, and then to be dismayed at
its own creations. In one of my dreams, for instance, I seemed to
wander in the bare and silent corridors of a great house. I passed a
small and sinister door, and was impelled to open it. I found myself in
a large oak-panelled room, with small barred windows admitting a sickly
light. The floor was paved with stone; and in the centre, built into
the pavement, stood a large block of basalt, black and smooth, which
was roughly carved into the semblance of a gigantic human head. I
stared at this for a long time, and then swiftly withdrew, overcome
with horror which I could not translate into words. All that I seemed
to know was that some kind of shocking rites were here celebrated: I
did not know what they were, and there were no signs of anything; no
instruments of death, no trace of slaughter; yet for all that I knew
that the place stood for some evil mystery, and the very walls and
floor seemed soaked with fear and pain.

That is the inexplicable part of dreams, that one should invent
incidents and scenes of every kind, with no sense of invention or
creation, with no feeling that one is able to control what one appears
to hear or see; and then that in some other part of one's mind, one
should be moved and stirred by the appropriate emotions awakened by
word or sight. In waking hours one can be stirred, amused, grieved by
the exercise of one's imagination, but one is aware that it is
imagination, and one does not lose the sense of responsibility, the
consciousness of creation.

It is this sensation, that dreams arise from some power or influence
exterior to oneself, which them the significance which they used to
possess, and indeed still possess, for the unreasoning mind. They seem
communications from some other sphere of life, experiences external to
oneself, messages from some hidden agency. When they correspond, as by
coincidence they are almost bound on occasions to do, with some
unforeseen and unexpected event that follows them, it is very difficult
for unphilosophical minds not to believe that they are visions sent
from som