with what authority
I can thus postulate the home-made dreams of any lier in bed but myself,
the answer is easy. It is common knowledge that the half-awake minds of
men thus employ themselves, and the fashion of their employment may be
reasonably deduced from observation of individuals. The _ego_ even of a
modest man will be somewhat rampant; the _ego_ of a conceited one would,
barring its capability for infinite expansion, swell up and bust. But
this riot of egoism has as little relation to the Fine Art of Lying in
Bed as a movie play has to the fine art of the drama. The true artist
may take fair advantage of his nice state of unreason to defy time and
space, but he will respect essential verities. He will treat his _ego_
like the child it is; and, taking example from a careful mother, tie a
rope to it when he lets it out to play. Thus he will capture a kind of
immortality; and his lying in bed, a transitory state itself, will
contradict the transitory character of life outside of it. Companions he
has known and loved will come from whatever remote places to share these
moments, for the Fine Art of Lying in Bed consists largely in
cultivating that inward eye with which Wordsworth saw the daffodils.

Whether this can be done on the wooden pillow of the Japanese I have no
way of knowing; but I suspect there were some admirable liers in bed
among the Roman patricians who were grossly accused of effeminacy
because they slept on feathers.

The north of China, where bedding is laid in winter on raised platforms
gently heated by little furnaces underneath, must have produced some
highly cultivated liers in bed. The proverbial shortness of the German
bed (which perhaps explains the German _Kultur_) may have tended to
discourage the art and at the same time unconsciously stimulated a
hatred of England, where the beds are proverbially generous. One can at
least hope, however, that all beds are alike in this matter, provided
the occupant is a proper lier, who can say fairly,--

My bed has legs
To run away
From Here and Now
And Everyday.
It trots me off
From slumber deep
To the Dear Land
Of Half-Asleep.

TO BORE OR NOT TO BORE

'Take me away,' said Thomas Carlyle, when silence settled for a moment
over a dinner-table where one of the diners had been monologuing to the
extreme limit of boredom, 'for God's sake take me away and put me in a
room by myself and give me a pipe of tobacco!'