M. Do you know chess?

Y.M. I learned it a week ago.

O.M. Did your mind go on playing the game all night that first night?

Y.M. Don't mention it!

O.M. It was eagerly, unsatisfiably interested; it rioted in the
combinations; you implored it to drop the game and let you get some
sleep?

Y.M. Yes. It wouldn't listen; it played right along. It wore me out and
I got up haggard and wretched in the morning.

O.M. At some time or other you have been captivated by a ridiculous
rhyme-jingle?

Y.M. Indeed, yes!

"I saw Esau kissing Kate, And she saw I saw Esau; I saw Esau, he saw
Kate, And she saw--"

And so on. My mind went mad with joy over it. It repeated it all day
and all night for a week in spite of all I could do to stop it, and it
seemed to me that I must surely go crazy.

O.M. And the new popular song?

Y.M. Oh yes! "In the Swee-eet By and By"; etc. Yes, the new popular song
with the taking melody sings through one's head day and night, asleep
and awake, till one is a wreck. There is no getting the mind to let it
alone.

O.M. Yes, asleep as well as awake. The mind is quite independent. It is
master. You have nothing to do with it. It is so apart from you that
it can conduct its affairs, sing its songs, play its chess, weave its
complex and ingeniously constructed dreams, while you sleep. It has
no use for your help, no use for your guidance, and never uses either,
whether you be asleep or awake. You have imagined that you could
originate a thought in your mind, and you have sincerely believed you
could do it.

Y.M. Yes, I have had that idea.

O.M. Yet you can't originate a dream-thought for it to work out, and get
it accepted?

Y.M. No.

O.M. And you can't dictate its procedure after it has originated a
dream-thought for itself?

Y.M. No. No one can do it. Do you think the waking mind and the dream
mind are the same machine?

O.M. There is argument for it. We have wild and fantastic day-thoughts?
Things that are dream-like?

Y.M. Yes--like Mr. Wells's man who invented a drug that made him
invisible; and like the Arabian tales of the Thousand Nights.

O.M. And there are dreams that are rational, simple, consistent, and
unfantastic?

Y.M. Yes. I have dreams that are like that. Dreams that are just like
real life; dreams in which there are several persons with distinctly
differentiated characters--inventions of my mind and yet strangers
to me: a vulgar person; a refined one; a wise person; a