iting for an opportunity
to cut your throat. You remember how you escaped them by some ingenious
stratagem; then you doubted if they were really deceived, or whether
they were only pretending not to know your hiding-place; then you
thought of another plan and hoodwinked them once again. You remember all
this quite clearly, but how is it that your reason calmly accepted all
the manifest absurdities and impossibilities that crowded into your
dream? One of the murderers suddenly changed into a woman before your
very eyes; then the woman was transformed into a hideous, cunning little
dwarf; and you believed it, and accepted it all almost as a matter of
course--while at the same time your intelligence seemed unusually keen,
and accomplished miracles of cunning, sagacity, and logic! Why is it
that when you awake to the world of realities you nearly always feel,
sometimes very vividly, that the vanished dream has carried with it some
enigma which you have failed to solve? You smile at the extravagance
of your dream, and yet you feel that this tissue of absurdity contained
some real idea, something that belongs to your true life,--something
that exists, and has always existed, in your heart. You search your
dream for some prophecy that you were expecting. It has left a deep
impression upon you, joyful or cruel, but what it means, or what has
been predicted to you in it, you can neither understand nor remember.

The reading of these letters produced some such effect upon the prince.
He felt, before he even opened the envelopes, that the very fact of
their existence was like a nightmare. How could she ever have made up
her mind to write to her? he asked himself. How could she write about
that at all? And how could such a wild idea have entered her head?
And yet, the strangest part of the matter was, that while he read the
letters, he himself almost believed in the possibility, and even in the
justification, of the idea he had thought so wild. Of course it was a
mad dream, a nightmare, and yet there was something cruelly real about
it. For hours he was haunted by what he had read. Several passages
returned again and again to his mind, and as he brooded over them, he
felt inclined to say to himself that he had foreseen and known all that
was written here; it even seemed to him that he had read the whole of
this some time or other, long, long ago; and all that had tormented and
grieved him up to now was to be found in these old, long