[Decoration]
OFTEN, in the blind dead of the night, I find myself reading a book,--a
big broad book,--a dream-book. By "dream-book," I do not mean a book
about dreams, but a book made of the stuff that dreams are made of.
I do not know the name of the book, nor the name of its author: I have
not been able to see the title-page; and there is no running title. As
for the back of the volume, it remains,--like the back of the
Moon,--invisible forever.
At no time have I touched the book in any way,--not even to turn a leaf.
Somebody, always viewless, holds it up and open before me in the dark;
and I can read it only because it is lighted by a light that comes from
nowhere. Above and beneath and on either side of the book there is
darkness absolute; but the pages seem to retain the yellow glow of
lamps that once illuminated them.
A queer fact is that I never see the entire text of a page at once,
though I see the whole page itself plainly. The text rises, or seems to
rise, to the surface of the paper as I gaze, and fades out almost
immediately after having been read. By a simple effort of will, I can
recall the vanished sentences to the page; but they do not come back in
the same form as before: they seem to have been oddly revised during the
interval. Never can I coax even one fugitive line to reproduce itself
exactly as it read at first. But I can always force something to return;
and this something remains sharply distinct during perusal. Then it
turns faint grey, and appears to sink--as through thick milk--backward
out of sight.
* * * * *
By regularly taking care to write down, immediately upon awakening,
whatever I could remember reading in the dream-book, I found myself able
last year to reproduce portions of the text. But the order in which I
now present these fragments is not at all the order in which I recovered
them. If they seem to have any interconnection, this is only because I
tried to arrange them in what I imagined to be the rational sequence. Of
their original place and relation, I know scarcely anything. And, even
regarding the character of the book itself, I have been able to discover
only that a great part of it consists of dialogues about the
Unthinkable.