wton was possessed by that
idea.

When Overholt had been alone for some time, he got up from the horsehair
sofa and crept up the stairs, leaning on the shaky bannister like an old
man. In his own room he plunged his face into icy cold water again and
again, as if it were burning, and the sharp chill revived his nerves a
little. There was no stove in the room, and before midnight the water
would be frozen in the pitcher. He sat down and rubbed his forehead and
wondered whether he was really any better, or was only imagining or even
pretending that he was, because he wanted to be. Our own reflections
about our own sensations are never so silly as at the greatest moments
in our lives, because the tremendous strain on the higher faculties
releases all the little ones, as in sleep, and they behave and reason as
idiotically as they do in dreams, which is saying a good deal. Perhaps
lunatics are only people who are perpetually asleep and dreaming with
one part of their brains while the other parts are awake. They certainly
behave as if that were the matter, and it seems a rational explanation
of ordinary insanity, curable or incurable. Did you ever talk to a
lunatic? On the subject on which he is insane he thinks and talks as you
do when you are dreaming; but he may be quite awake and sensible about
all other matters. He dreams he is rich, and he goes out and orders
cartloads of things from shops. Pray, have you never dreamt that you
were rich? Or he dreams that he is a poached egg, and must have a piece
of toast to sit down upon. I believe that well-known story of a lunatic
to be founded on fact. Have you never dreamt that you were somebody or
something quite different from yourself? Have you never dreamt that you
were an innocent man, persecuted, tried for a crime, and sentenced to
prison, or even death? And yet, at the same time, in your dream, you
were behaving with the utmost good sense about everything else. When
you are dreaming, you are a perfect lunatic; why may it not be true that
the waking lunatic is really dreaming all the time, with one part of his
brain?

John Henry Overholt was apparently wide awake, but he had been morally
stunned that day; he was dreaming that he was going crazy, and he could
not, for the life of him, tell whether he really felt any better after
cooling his head in the basin than before, though it seemed immensely
important to find out, just then. Afterwards, when it was all over, and
thing