es that sound like "discretion,"
"acumen," "initiative," "enterprise." These noises are especially
gratifying when they are made backward. They mean the same things, but
they sound different. And in either case, forward or backward, the
spirit of the dream is not disturbed.

When a man strikes a foul blow in the prize-ring the fight is immediately
stopped, he is declared the loser, and he is hissed by the audience as he
leaves the ring. But when a man who walks in his sleep strikes a foul
blow he is immediately declared the victor and awarded the prize; and
amid acclamations he forthwith turns his prize into a seat in the United
States Senate, into a grotesque palace on Fifth Avenue, and into endowed
churches, universities and libraries, to say nothing of subsidized
newspapers, to proclaim his greatness.

The red animal in the somnambulist will out. He decries the carnal
combat of the prize-ring, and compels the red animal to spiritual combat.
The poisoned lie, the nasty, gossiping tongue, the brutality of the
unkind epigram, the business and social nastiness and treachery of
to-day--these are the thrusts and scratches of the red animal when the
somnambulist is in charge. They are not the upper cuts and short arm
jabs and jolts and slugging blows of the spirit. They are the foul blows
of the spirit that have never been disbarred, as the foul blows of the
prize-ring have been disbarred. (Would it not be preferable for a man to
strike one full on the mouth with his fist than for him to tell a lie
about one, or malign those that are nearest and dearest?)

For these are the crimes of the spirit, and, alas! they are so much more
frequent than blows on the mouth. And whosoever exalts the spirit over
the flesh, by his own creed avers that a crime of the spirit is vastly
more terrible than a crime of the flesh. Thus stand the somnambulists
convicted by their own creed--only they are not real men, alive and
awake, and they proceed to mutter magic phrases that dispel all doubt as
to their undiminished and eternal gloriousness.

It is well enough to let the ape and tiger die, but it is hardly fair to
kill off the natural and courageous apes and tigers and allow the spawn
of cowardly apes and tigers to live. The prize-fighting apes and tigers
will die all in good time in the course of natural evolution, but they
will not die so long as the cowardly, somnambulistic apes and tigers club
and scratch and slash. This is n