During this first period of the jacket-inquisition I managed to sleep a great deal.  My dreams were remarkable.  Of course they were vivid and real, as most dreams are.  What made them remarkable was their coherence and continuity.  Often I addressed bodies of scientists on abstruse subjects, reading aloud to them carefully prepared papers on my own researches or on my own deductions from the researches and experiments of others.  When I awakened my voice would seem still ringing in my ears, while my eyes still could see typed on the white paper whole sentences and paragraphs that I could read again and marvel at ere the vision faded.  In passing, I call attention to the fact that at the time I noted that the process of reasoning employed in these dream speeches was invariably deductive.

Then there was a great farming section, extending north and south for hundreds of miles in some part of the temperate regions, with a climate and flora and fauna largely resembling those of California.  Not once, nor twice, but thousands of different times I journeyed through this dream-region.  The point I desire to call attention to was that it was always the same region.  No essential feature of it ever differed in the different dreams.  Thus it was always an eight-hour drive behind mountain horses from the alfalfa meadows (where I kept many Jersey cows) to the straggly village beside the big dry creek, where I caught the little narrow-gauge train.  Every land-mark in that eight-hour drive in the mountain buckboard, every tree, every mountain, every ford and bridge, every ridge and eroded hillside was ever the same.

In this coherent, rational farm-region of my strait-jacket dreams the minor details, according to season and to the labour of men, did change.  Thus on the upland pastures behind my alfalfa meadows I developed a new farm with the aid of Angora goats.  Here I marked the changes with every dream-visit, and the changes were in accordance with the time that elapsed between visits.

Oh, those brush-covered slopes!  How I can see them now just as when the goats were first introduced.  And how I remembered the consequent changes—­the paths beginning to form as the goats literally ate their way through the dense thickets; the disappearance of the younger, smaller bushes that were not too tall for total browsing; the vistas that formed in all directions through the older, taller bushes, as the goats browsed as high as they could stand and reach on their hind legs; the driftage of the pasture grasses that followed in the wake of the clearing by the goats.  Yes, the continuity of such dreaming was its charm.  Came the day when the men with axes chopped down all the taller brush so as to give the goats access to the leaves and buds and bark.  Came the day, in winter weather, when the dry denuded skeletons of all these bushes were gathered into heaps and burned.  Came the day when I moved my goats on to other brush-impregnable hillsides, with following in their wake my cattle, pasturing knee-deep in the succulent grasses that grew where before had been only brush.  And came the day when I moved my cattle on, and my plough-men went back and forth across the slopes’ contour—­ploughing the rich sod under to rot to live and crawling humous in which to bed my seeds of crops to be.