, and behind it lies the true Reality, if only I could find the
way to seize it. It is due, I suppose, to some native and ineradicable
strain of mysticism; or perhaps, as I sometimes think, to the memory
of a strange experience which I once underwent and have never been
able to forget"

"What was that?"

"It will not be very easy, I fear, to describe, but perhaps it may be
worth while to make the attempt, for it bears, more or less, on the
subject of our conversation. Once then, you must know, and once
only, a good many years ago now, I was put under the influence
of anaesthetics; and during the time I was unconscious, or rather,
conscious in a new way, I had a very curious dream, if dream it were,
which has never ceased to affect my thoughts and my life. It was as
follows:

"As soon as I lost consciousness of the world without, my soul, I
thought, which seemed at first to be diffused throughout my body,
began to draw itself upward, beginning at the feet. It passed through
the veins of the legs and belly to the heart, which was beating like a
thousand drums, and thence by the aorta and the carotids to the brain,
whence it emerged by the fissures of the skull into the outer air.
No sooner was it free (though still attached, as I felt with some
uneasiness, by a thin elastic cord to the pia mater) than it gathered
itself together (into what form I could not say), and with incredible
speed shot upwards, till it reached what seemed to be the floor of
heaven. Through this it passed, I know not how, and found itself all
at once in a new world.

"What this world was like I must now endeavour to explain, difficult
though it be to find suitable language; for the things here, of which
our words are symbols, are themselves only symbols of the things
there. The feeling I had, however, (for I was now identified with my
soul, and had forgotten all about my body)--the feeling I had was that
of sitting alone beside a river. What kind of country it was I can
hardly describe, for there was nowhere any definite colour or form,
only a suggestion, such as I have seen in drawings, of vast infinite
tracts of empty space. I could not even say there was light or
darkness, for my organ of perception did not seem to be the eye; only
I was aware of an emotional effect similar to that of twilight, cold,
grey, and formless as night itself. The silence was absolute, if
indeed silence it were, for it was not by the ear that I perceived
either sou