elessly idiotic? It is true, whether any one has ever said so or not.
Inanimate things turn into living creatures, the chair we sit on becomes
a horse, the arm-chair is turned into a wild beast; and we ride
a-hunting through endless drawing-rooms which are full of trees and
undergrowth, till the trees are suddenly people and are all dancing and
laughing at us, because we have come to the ball in attire so
exceedingly scanty that we wonder how the servants could have let us in.
And in the midst of all this, when we are frantically searching for our
clothes, and for a railway ticket, which we are sure is in the
right-hand pocket of the waistcoat, if only we could find it, and if
some one would tell us from which side of the station the train starts,
and we wish we had not forgotten to eat something, and had not unpacked
all our luggage and scattered everything about the railway refreshment
room, and that some kind person would tell us where our money is, and
that another would take a few of the fifty things we are trying to hold
in our hands without dropping any of them; in the midst of all this, I
say, a dead man we knew comes from his grave and stares at us, and asks
why we cruelly let him die, long ago, without saying that one word which
would have meant joy or despair to him at the last moment. Then our hair
stands up and our teeth chatter, because the secret of the soul has
risen against us where we least expected it; and we wake alone in the
dark with the memory of the dead.

Is not that madness? What else can madness be but that disjointing of
ordered facts into dim and disorderly fiction, pierced here and there by
lingering lights of memory and reason? All of us sometimes go mad in our
sleep. But it does not follow that in dreaming we are not sometimes
sane, rational, responsible, our own selves, good or bad, doing and
saying things which we might say and do in real life, but which we have
never said nor done, incurring the consequences of our words and deeds
as if they were actual, keeping good faith or breaking it, according to
our own natures, accomplishing by effort, or failing through indolence,
as the case may be, blushing with genuine shame, laughing with genuine
mirth, and burning with genuine anger; and all this may go on from the
beginning to the end of the dream, without a single moment of
impossibility, without one incident which would surprise us in the
waking state. With most people dreams of this kin