Preface*

The chronicles which I am about to present to the reader are not the result of any conscious effort of the imagination.  They are, as the title-page indicates, records of dreams, occurring at intervals during the last ten years, and transcribed, pretty nearly in the order of their occurrence, from my Diary.  Written down as soon as possible after awaking from the slumber during which they presented themselves, these narratives, necessarily unstudied in style and wanting in elegance of diction, have at least the merit of fresh and vivid color, for they were committed to paper at a moment when the effect and impress of each successive vision were strong and forceful in the mind, and before the illusion of reality conveyed by the scenes witnessed and the sounds heard in sleep had had time to pass away.

I do not know whether these experiences of mine are unique.  So far, I have not yet met with any one in whom the dreaming faculty appears to be either so strongly or so strangely developed as in myself.  Most dreams, even when of unusual vividness and lucidity, betray a want of coherence in their action, and an incongruity of detail and dramatis personae, that stamp

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* Written in 1886.   Some of the experiences in this volume were 
subsequent to that date.   This publication is made in accordance 
with the author’s last wishes.  (Ed.)
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them as the product of incomplete and disjointed cerebral function.  But the most remarkable features of the experiences I am about to record are the methodical consecutiveness of their sequences, and the intelligent purpose disclosed alike in the events witnessed and in the words heard or read.  Some of these last, indeed, resemble, for point and profundity, the apologues of Eastern scriptures; and, on more than one occasion, the scenery of the dream has accurately portrayed characteristics of remote regions, city, forest and mountain, which in this existence at least I have never beheld, nor, so far as I can remember, even heard described, and yet, every feature of these unfamiliar climes has revealed itself to my sleeping vision with a splendour of coloring and distinctness of outline which made the waking life seem duller and less real by contrast.  I know of no parallel to this phenomenon unless in the pages of Bulwer Lytton’s romance entitled—­“The Pilgrims of the Rhine,” in which is related the story of a German student endowed with so marvellous a faculty of dreaming, that for him the normal conditions of sleeping and waking became reversed, his true life was that which he lived in his slumbers, and his hours of wakefulness appeared to him as so many uneventful and inactive intervals of arrest occurring in an existence of intense and vivid interest which was wholly passed in the hypnotic state.  Not that to me there is any such inversion of natural conditions.