At This Point I Wake Up, Thoroughly Exhausted, And Say To
Myself:
"Why seek his house?
Is he not dead?"
This stupid nightmare leaves me unrefreshed next morning, and often
bears in its rear a trail of wistfulness which may endure a week. Only
within the last few years has it dared to invade my slumbers. Before
that period there was a series of other recurrent dreams. What will the
next be? For I mean to oust this particular incubus. The monster annoys
me, and even our mulish dream-consciousness can be taught to acquiesce
in a fact, after a sufficient lapse of time.
There are dreams peculiar to every age of man. That celebrated one of
flying, for instance - it fades away with manhood. I once indulged in a
correspondence about it with a well-known psychologist, [8] and would
like to think, even now, that this dream is a reminiscence of leaping
habits in our tree-haunting days; a ghost of the dim past, therefore,
which revisits us at night when recent adjustments are cast aside and
man takes on the credulity and savagery of his remotest forefathers; a
ghost which comes in youth when these ancient etchings are easier to
decypher, being not yet overscored by fresh personal experiences. What
is human life but a never-ending palimpsest?
So I pondered, when my musings under that pine tree were interrupted by
the arrival on the scene of a young snake. I cannot say with any degree
of truthfulness which of us two was more surprised at the encounter.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 107 of 291
Words from 28137 to 28397
of 77809
