s agency. From a child he had been a great and vivid
dreamer, his dreams often taking such frightful shape that he used to
awake 'clinging in terror to the bedpost.' Later in life his dreams
continued to be frequent and vivid, but less terrifying in character and
more continuous and systematic. 'The Brownies,' as he picturesquely
names that 'sub-conscious imagination,' as the scientist would call it,
that works with such surprising freedom and ingenuity in our dreams,
became, as it were, _collaborateurs_ in his work of authorship. He
declares that they invented plots and even elaborated whole novels, and
that, not in a single night or single dream, but continuously, and from
one night to another, like a story in serial parts. Long before this
essay was written or published, I had been struck by this phantasmal
dream-like quality in some of Stevenson's works, which I was puzzled to
account for, until I read this extraordinary explanation, for explanation
it undoubtedly affords. Anything imagined in a dream would have a
tendency, when retold, to retain something of its dream-like character,
and I have on doubt one could trace in many instances and distinguish the
dreaming and the waking Stevenson, though in others they may be blended
beyond recognition. The trouble with the Brownies or the dream-Stevenson
_was his or their want of moral sense_, so that they sometimes presented
the waking author with plots which he could not make use of. Of this
Stevenson gives an instance in which a complete story of marked ingenuity
is vetoed through the moral impossibility of its presentment by a writer
so scrupulous (and in some directions he is extremely scrupulous) as
Stevenson was. But Stevenson admits that his most famous story, _The
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_, was not only suggested by a
dream, but that some of the most important and most criticised points,
such as the matter of the powder, were taken direct from the dream. It
had been extremely instructive and interesting had he gone more into
detail and mentioned some of the other stories into which the
dream-element entered largely and pointed out its influence, and would
have given us a better clue than we have or now ever can have.

"Even in _The Suicide Club_ and the _Rajah's Diamond_, I seem to feel
strongly the presence of the dream-Stevenson. . . . _At certain points
one feels conscious of a certain moral callousness_, _such as marks the
dream state_,