The soul cannot have much knowledge till it has shaken off the habit of
time and of place, but till that hour it must fix its attention upon what
is near, thinking of objects one after another as we run the eye or the
finger over them. Its intellectual power cannot but increase and alter as
its perceptions grow simultaneous. Yet even now we seem at moments to
escape from time in what we call prevision, and from place when we see
distant things in a dream and in concurrent dreams. A couple of years ago,
while in meditation, my head seemed surrounded by a conventional sun's
rays, and when I went to bed I had a long dream of a woman with her hair
on fire. I awoke and lit a candle, and discovered presently from the odour
that in doing so I had set my own hair on fire. I dreamed very lately that
I was writing a story, and at the same time I dreamed that I was one of
the characters in that story and seeking to touch the heart of some girl
in defiance of the author's intention; and concurrently with all that, I
was as another self trying to strike with the button of a foil a great
china jar. The obscurity of the prophetic books of William Blake, which
were composed in a state of vision, comes almost wholly from these
concurrent dreams. Everybody has some story or some experience of the
sudden knowledge in sleep or waking of some event, a misfortune for the
most part happening to some friend far off.