All this, and much more than I can say or have time to say, the reader must enter into before he can comprehend the unimaginable horror which these dreams of Oriental imagery and mythological tortures impressed upon me.  Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlight, I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Indostan.  From kindred feelings I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law.  I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroqueats, by cockatoos.  I ran into pagodas, and was fixed for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed.  I fled from the wrath of Brahma through all the forests of Asia; Vishnu hated me; Siva laid wait for me.  I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris; I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids.  I was kissed by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.

Over every form and threat and punishment brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that drove me into an oppression as of madness.  Into these dreams only it was, with one or two slight exceptions, that any circumstances of physical horror entered.  But here the main agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles; especially the last.  The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest.  I was compelled to live with him, and—­as was almost always the case in my dreams—­for centuries.  And so often did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams that many times the very same dream was broken up in the very same way.  I heard gentle voices speaking to me—­I hear everything when I am sleeping—­and instantly I awoke.  It was broad noon, and my children were standing, hand in hand, at my bedside—­come to show me their coloured shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out.  I protest that so awful was the transition from the detestable crocodile, and the other unutterable monsters and abortions of my dreams, to the sight of innocent human natures and of infancy that in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind I wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces.

VI.—­The Agonies of Sleep

As a final specimen, I cite a dream of a different character, from 1820.  The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in dreams—­a music of preparation and of awakening suspense, a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast march, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies.  The morning was come of a mighty day—­a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread extremity.  Somewhere, I knew not where—­somehow, I knew not how—­by some beings, I knew not whom—­a battle, a strife, an agony, was conducting, was evolving like a great drama or piece of music, with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion as to its place, its cause, its nature, and possible issue.