I went on through Euston Road to Tottenham Court Road, puzzled, and a little frightened, and scarcely noticed the unusual way I was taking, for commonly I used to cut through the intervening network of back streets.  I turned into University Street, to discover that I had forgotten my number.  Only by a strong effort did I recall 11A, and even then it seemed to me that it was a thing some forgotten person had told me.  I tried to steady my mind by recalling the incidents of the dinner, and for the life of me I could conjure up no picture of my host’s face; I saw him only as a shadowy outline, as one might see oneself reflected in a window through which one was looking.  In his place, however, I had a curious exterior vision of myself, sitting at a table, flushed, bright-eyed, and talkative.

“I must take this other powder,” said I.  “This is getting impossible.”

I tried the wrong side of the hall for my candle and the matches, and had a doubt of which landing my room might be on.  “I’m drunk,” I said, “that’s certain,” and blundered needlessly on the staircase to sustain the proposition.

At the first glance my room seemed unfamiliar.  “What rot!” I said, and stared about me.  I seemed to bring myself back by the effort, and the odd phantasmal quality passed into the concrete familiar.  There was the old glass still, with my notes on the albumens stuck in the corner of the frame, my old everyday suit of clothes pitched about the floor.  And yet it was not so real after all.  I felt an idiotic persuasion trying to creep into my mind, as it were, that I was in a railway carriage in a train just stopping, that I was peering out of the window at some unknown station.  I gripped the bed-rail firmly to reassure myself.  “It’s clairvoyance, perhaps,” I said.  “I must write to the Psychical Research Society.”

I put the rouleau on my dressing-table, sat on my bed, and began to take off my boots.  It was as if the picture of my present sensations was painted over some other picture that was trying to show through.  “Curse it!” said I; “my wits are going, or am I in two places at once?” Half-undressed, I tossed the powder into a glass and drank it off.  It effervesced, and became a fluorescent amber colour.  Before I was in bed my mind was already tranquillised.  I felt the pillow at my cheek, and thereupon I must have fallen asleep.

* * * * *

I awoke abruptly out of a dream of strange beasts, and found myself lying on my back.  Probably every one knows that dismal, emotional dream from which one escapes, awake indeed, but strangely cowed.  There was a curious taste in my mouth, a tired feeling in my limbs, a sense of cutaneous discomfort.  I lay with my head motionless on my pillow, expecting that my feeling of strangeness and terror would pass away, and that I should then doze off again to sleep.  But instead of that, my uncanny sensations increased.  At first I could perceive nothing wrong about me.  There was a faint light in the room, so faint that it was the very next thing to darkness, and the furniture stood out in it as vague blots of absolute darkness.  I stared with my eyes just over the bedclothes.