"Ah, I don't believe it," the girl said. "They are too real for that.
They come too often, and they make me feel as if they would come more
fully, some time. If there was a life before this--do you believe there
was?--they may be things that happened there. Or they may be things that
will happen in a life after this. You believe in _that_, don't you?"
"In a life after this, or their happening in it?"
"Well, both."
Lanfear evaded her, partly. "They could be premonitions, prophecies, of
a future life, as easily as fragmentary records of a past life. I
suppose we do not begin to be immortal merely after death."
"No." She lingered out the word in dreamy absence, as if what they had
been saying had already passed from her thought.
"But, Miss Gerald," Lanfear ventured, "have these impressions of yours
grown more definite--fuller, as you say--of late?"
"My impressions?" She frowned at him, as if the look of interest, more
intense than usual in his eyes, annoyed her. "I don't know what you
mean."
Lanfear felt bound to follow up her lead, whether she wished it or not.
"A good third of our lives here is passed in sleep. I'm not always sure
that we are right in treating the mental--for certainly they are
mental--experiences of that time as altogether trivial, or
insignificant."
She seemed to understand now, and she protested: "But I don't mean
dreams. I mean things that really happened, or that really will happen."
"Like something you can give me an instance of? Are they painful things,
or pleasant, mostly?"
She hesitated. "They are things that you know happen to other people,
but you can't believe would ever happen to you."
"Do they come when you are just drowsing, or just waking from a drowse?"
"They are not dreams," she said, almost with vexation.
"Yes, yes, I understand," he hesitated to retrieve himself. "But _I_
have had floating illusions, just before I fell asleep, or when I was
sensible of not being quite awake, which seemed to differ from dreams.
They were not so dramatic, but they were more pictorial; they were more
visual than the things in dreams."
"Yes," she assented. "They are something like that. But I should not
call them illusions."
"No. And they represent scenes, events?"
"You said yourself they were not dramatic."
"I meant, represent pictorially."
"No; they are like the landscape that flies back from your train or
towards it. I can't explain it," she ended, rising with what he felt a
displeasure in his pursuit.