of
the drinking-places at the end of the day. You have never felt the bite
of the morning wind in the tree-tops, nor is the taste of young bark
sweet in your mouth.

It would be better, I dare say, for you to make your approach, as I made
mine, through my childhood. As a boy I was very like other boys--in my
waking hours. It was in my sleep that I was different. From my earliest
recollection my sleep was a period of terror. Rarely were my dreams
tinctured with happiness. As a rule, they were stuffed with fear--and
with a fear so strange and alien that it had no ponderable quality.
No fear that I experienced in my waking life resembled the fear that
possessed me in my sleep. It was of a quality and kind that transcended
all my experiences.

For instance, I was a city boy, a city child, rather, to whom the
country was an unexplored domain. Yet I never dreamed of cities; nor did
a house ever occur in any of my dreams. Nor, for that matter, did any of
my human kind ever break through the wall of my sleep. I, who had seen
trees only in parks and illustrated books, wandered in my sleep through
interminable forests. And further, these dream trees were not a mere
blur on my vision. They were sharp and distinct. I was on terms of
practised intimacy with them. I saw every branch and twig; I saw and
knew every different leaf.

Well do I remember the first time in my waking life that I saw an oak
tree. As I looked at the leaves and branches and gnarls, it came to me
with distressing vividness that I had seen that same kind of tree many
and countless times in my sleep. So I was not surprised, still later on
in my life, to recognize instantly, the first time I saw them, trees
such as the spruce, the yew, the birch, and the laurel. I had seen them
all before, and was seeing them even then, every night, in my sleep.

This, as you have already discerned, violates the first law of dreaming,
namely, that in one's dreams one sees only what he has seen in his
waking life, or combinations of the things he has seen in his waking
life. But all my dreams violated this law. In my dreams I never saw
ANYTHING of which I had knowledge in my waking life. My dream life
and my waking life were lives apart, with not one thing in common save
myself. I was the connecting link that somehow lived both lives.

Early in my childhood I learned that nuts came from the grocer, berries
from the fruit man; but before ever that knowledge was mine, in my
dre