One rarely loses one's personality in dreams; it is rather intensified,
with all the proper circumstances and relations of it, but I have had at
least one dream in which I seemed to transcend my own circumstance and
condition with remarkable completeness. Even my epoch, my precious
present, I left behind (or ahead, rather), and in my unity with the
persons of my dream I became strictly mediæval. In fact, I have always
called it my mediæval dream, to such as I could get to listen to it; and
it had for its scene a feudal tower in some waste place, a tower open at
the top and with a deep, clear pool of water at the bottom, so that it
instantly became known to me, as if I had always known it, for the Pool
Tower. While I stood looking into it, in a mediæval dress and a mediæval
mood, there came flying in at the open door of the ruin beside me the
duke's hunchback, and after him, furious and shrieking maledictions, the
swarthy beauty whom I was aware the duke was tired of. The keeping was
now not only ducal, but thoroughly Italian, and it was suggested somehow
to my own subtle Italian perception that the hunchback had been set on
to tease the girl and provoke her so that she would turn upon him and
try to wreak her fury on him and chase him into the Pool Tower and up
the stone stairs that wound round its hollow to the top, where the
solemn sky showed. The fearful spire of the steps was unguarded, and
when I had lost the pair from sight, with the dwarf's mocking laughter
and the girl's angry cries in my ears, there came fluttering from the
height, like a bird wounded and whirling from a lofty tree, the figure
of the girl, while far aloof the hunchback peered over at her fall.
Midway in her descent her head struck against the edge of the steps,
with a _kish_, such as an egg-shell makes when broken against the edge
of a platter, and then plunged into the dark pool at my feet, where I
could presently see her lying in the clear depths and the blood curling
upward from the wound in her skull like a dark smoke. I was not sensible
of any great pity; I accepted the affair, quite mediævally, as something
that might very well have happened, given the girl, the duke and the
dwarf, and the time and place.