-possession and rectitude
of mind. At the time when many of the most vivid and remarkable
visions occurred I was following my course as a student at the Paris
Faculty of Medicine, preparing for examinations, daily visiting
hospital wards as dresser, and attending lectures. Later, when I had
taken my degree, I was engaged in the duties of my profession and in
writing for the Press on scientific subjects. Neither had I ever
taken opium, haschish, or other dream-producing agent. A cup of tea
or coffee represents the extent of my indulgences in this direction. I
mention these details in order to guard against inferences which might
otherwise be drawn as to the genesis of my faculty.

It may, perhaps, be worthy of notice that by far the larger number of
the dreams set down in this volume occurred towards dawn; sometimes
even, after sunrise, during a 'second sleep.' A condition of fasting,
united possibly with some subtle magnetic or other atmospheric state,
seems, therefore, to be that most open to impressions of the kind.

This is the account given by the late Dr. Anna Kingsford of the genesis
of her remarkable volume, Dreams and Dream-Stories; and certainly some of
the stories, especially those entitled Steepside, Beyond the Sunset, and
The Village of Seers, are well worth reading, though not intrinsically
finer, either in motive or idea, than the general run of magazine
stories. No one who had the privilege of knowing Mrs. Kingsford, who was
one of the brilliant women of our day, can doubt for a single moment that
these tales came to her in the way she describes; but to me the result is
just a little disappointing. Perhaps, however, I expect too much. There
is no reason whatsoever why the imagination should be finer in hours of
dreaming than in its hours of waking. Mrs. Kingsford quotes a letter
written by Jamblichus to Agathocles, in which he says: 'The soul has a
twofold life, a lower and a higher. In sleep the soul is liberated from
the constraint of the body, and enters, as an emancipated being, on its
divine life of intelligence. The nobler part of the mind is thus united
by abstraction to higher natures, and becomes a participant in the wisdom
and foreknowledge of the gods. . . . The night-time of the body is the
day-time of the soul.' But the great masterpieces of literature and the
great secrets of wisdom have not been communicated in this way; and even
in