tch phrases of a low-voiced conversation between
Josephus Jackson, the negro murderer on my right, and Bambeccio, the
Italian murderer on my left, who are discussing, through grated door to
grated door, back and forth past my grated door, the antiseptic virtues
and excellences of chewing tobacco for flesh wounds.

And in my suspended hand I hold my fountain pen, and as I remember that
other hands of me, in long gone ages, wielded ink-brush, and quill, and
stylus, I also find thought-space in time to wonder if that missionary,
when he was a little lad, ever trailed clouds of glory and glimpsed the
brightness of old star-roving days.

Well, back to solitary, after I had learned the code of knuckle-talk and
still found the hours of consciousness too long to endure. By
self-hypnosis, which I began successfully to practise, I became able to
put my conscious mind to sleep and to awaken and loose my subconscious
mind. But the latter was an undisciplined and lawless thing. It
wandered through all nightmarish madness, without coherence, without
continuity of scene, event, or person.

My method of mechanical hypnosis was the soul of simplicity. Sitting
with folded legs on my straw-mattress, I gazed fixedly at a fragment of
bright straw which I had attached to the wall of my cell near the door
where the most light was. I gazed at the bright point, with my eyes
close to it, and tilted upward till they strained to see. At the same
time I relaxed all the will of me and gave myself to the swaying
dizziness that always eventually came to me. And when I felt myself sway
out of balance backward, I closed my eyes and permitted myself to fall
supine and unconscious on the mattress.

And then, for half-an-hour, ten minutes, or as long as an hour or so, I
would wander erratically and foolishly through the stored memories of my
eternal recurrence on earth. But times and places shifted too swiftly. I
knew afterward, when I awoke, that I, Darrell Standing, was the linking
personality that connected all bizarreness and grotesqueness. But that
was all. I could never live out completely one full experience, one
point of consciousness in time and space. My dreams, if dreams they may
be called, were rhymeless and reasonless.

Thus, as a sample of my rovings: in a single interval of fifteen minutes
of subconsciousness I have crawled and bellowed in the slime of the
primeval world and sat beside Haas--further and cleaved the twentieth