lectures.  Later, when I had taken my degree, I was engaged in the duties of my profession and in writing for the Press on scientific subjects.  Neither had I ever taken opium, haschish, or other dream-producing agent.  A cup of tea or coffee represents the extent of my indulgences in this direction.  I mention these details in order to guard against inferences which might otherwise be drawn as to the genesis of my faculty.

It may, perhaps, be worthy of notice that by far the larger number of the dreams set down in this volume occurred towards dawn; sometimes even, after sunrise, during a ‘second sleep.’  A condition of fasting, united possibly with some subtle magnetic or other atmospheric state, seems, therefore, to be that most open to impressions of the kind.

This is the account given by the late Dr. Anna Kingsford of the genesis of her remarkable volume, Dreams and Dream-Stories; and certainly some of the stories, especially those entitled Steepside, Beyond the Sunset, and The Village of Seers, are well worth reading, though not intrinsically finer, either in motive or idea, than the general run of magazine stories.  No one who had the privilege of knowing Mrs. Kingsford, who was one of the brilliant women of our day, can doubt for a single moment that these tales came to her in the way she describes; but to me the result is just a little disappointing.  Perhaps, however, I expect too much.  There is no reason whatsoever why the imagination should be finer in hours of dreaming than in its hours of waking.  Mrs. Kingsford quotes a letter written by Jamblichus to Agathocles, in which he says:  ’The soul has a twofold life, a lower and a higher.  In sleep the soul is liberated from the constraint of the body, and enters, as an emancipated being, on its divine life of intelligence.  The nobler part of the mind is thus united by abstraction to higher natures, and becomes a participant in the wisdom and foreknowledge of the gods. . . .  The night-time of the body is the day-time of the soul.’  But the great masterpieces of literature and the great secrets of wisdom have not been communicated in this way; and even in Coleridge’s case, though Kubla Khan is wonderful, it is not more wonderful, while it is certainly less complete, than the Ancient Mariner.

As for the dreams themselves, which occupy the first portion of the book, their value, of course, depends chiefly on the value of the truths or predictions which they are supposed to impart.  I must confess that most modern mysticism seems to me to be simply a method of imparting useless knowledge in a form that no one can understand.  Allegory, parable, and vision have their high artistic uses, but their philosophical and scientific uses are very small.  However, here is one of Mrs. Kingsford’s dreams.  It has a pleasant quaintness about it: 

   THE WONDERFUL SPECTACLES