EIGHT of the stories in this book I did not compose. I dreamed them,
and in each the dream or nightmare needed little or no modification to
make a story of it.
The one exception is Floki’s Blade, which is based on an alleged
nightmare narrated to me by an acquaintance, who, when I said that I
should like to make a story of it, declared that he made me a present
of the ideas in the dream. From what he told me I have taken the
conception of the magic sword, conferring on its wielder superhuman
strength and also potent to discern foe from friend; likewise the
locality of the tale; all the rest is mine.
The latter part of Alfandega 49A I dreamed, as now written, after I
heard of the manner of the death of my acquaintance whom I have renamed
Pake.
Lukundoo was written after my nightmare without any manipulation of
mine, just as I dreamed it. But I should never have dreamed it had I
not previously read H. G. Wells’ very much better story, “Pollock and
the Porroh Man.” Anyone interested in dreams might relish comparing the
two tales. They have resemblant features, but are very unlike, and the
differences are such as no waking intellect would invent, but such as
come into a human mind only in a nightmare dream.
The others are paragon nightmares.
The House of the Nightmare is written just as I dreamed it, word for
word, since I had the concurrent sensations of reading the tale in
print and of it all happening to me in the archaic times when all
motor-cars were right-hand-drive and with gear-shift-levers outside
the tonneau. The dream had the unusual peculiarity that I woke after
the second nightmare, so shaken that my wife had to quiet and soothe
me as if I had been a scared child; and then I went to sleep again and
_finished the dream_! Its denouement came as a complete surprise
to me, as much of a shock as the climax of The Snout or of Amina.
It will be easy to realize that anyone dreaming such narratives as The
Picture Puzzle, The Message on the Slate and The Pig-skin Belt just had
to write them into stories to get them out of his system.