De Quincey's dream of Easter is as perfect an illustration as could be found of such alterations made in a dream scene, and of the blending of memories of places that are far apart into one dream picture. This beautiful dream, moreover, has little of the strangeness, and none of the horror, that characterised many of those that he recorded, and that made his nights so full of agitation and misery.

"I thought it was a Sunday morning in May, that it was Easter Sunday, and as yet very early in the morning. I was standing, as it seemed to me, at the door of my own cottage. Eight before me lay the very scene which could be commanded from that situation, but exalted, as was usual, and solemnised by the power of dreams. There were the same mountains, and the same lovely valley at their feet; but the mountains were raised to more than Alpine height, and there was interspace far larger between them of meadows and forest lawns. ... I gazed upon the well-known scene, and I said aloud (as I thought) to myself, 'It wants yet much of sunrise; and it is Easter Sunday; and that is the day on which they celebrate the first-fruits of resurrection. I will walk abroad; old griefs shall be forgotten today; for the air is cool and still . . . with the dew I can wash the fever from my forehead, and then I shall be unhappy no longer.' And I turned, as if to open my garden gate; and immediately I saw upon the left a scene far different; but which the power of dreams had reconciled into harmony with the other. The scene was an Oriental one; and there also it was Easter Sunday, and very early in the morning.

And at a vast distance were visible, as a stain upon the horizon, the domes and cupolas of a great city -an image or faint abstraction, caught perhaps in childhood from some picture of Jerusalem. And now a bow-shot from me, upon a stone and shaded by Judean palms, there sat a woman; and I looked; and it was - Ann."1

In the little book that has already been quoted, Mr. Martin speaks of the sense of pleasure renewed with which he enters his dream country, and, like him, I find it difficult to describe how happy some of these dreams are. When I have waked from them and have begun to write them down, I have wondered why it should seem so hard to be torn away from them, when so little had happened, and why they should give such an odd unexplained sense of joy. Dreams, so uneventful that it seems hardly worth while to record them at all, will give us that delicious childish sense of happiness. It is childlike, and that is no doubt in great part the secret of our pleasure. In dreams the responsibility that rests upon us by day is taken from us. Only the things of the present moment matter; and in this respect we become like children. I am sure that we "Olympians" make far too much of the actual happiness of the state of childhood; it is often infinitely happier to be "grown up"; but in this respect at least childhood is fortunate, and we, in our good dreams, axe fortunate too; the weight of responsible care is for a little while lifted from us.

It is because when we leave the dream country we leave that happy state of irresponsibility behind us that we feel such a pang of regret when we have to turn aside and come back to a workaday world where we have once more to shoulder our natural duties and cares. For a little while we had forgotten them and they were laid aside, but now again our lives belong not to ourselves but to others, and we often take up life again with a chill sense of disappointment. We come back, it is true, to a world that is just as lovely to look upon as the dream world that we have left, but we ourselves are different, and the spell is broken. In one of the most perfect of his essays, Elia tells his dream children of the great house in Norfolk, presided over by their great-grandmother Field, telling them "how I could never be tired with roaming about that huge mansion with its vast empty rooms, with their worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry, and carved oaken panels, with the gilding almost rubbed out." When we read afresh the tender wistful words with which Elia's story of his dream children closes, they bring back to us the same forlorn sense of disappointment that we also feel when we are called away from our happy dreams. We too are rueful to leave a dream country where we would so gladly have lingered.

Elia's beautiful dream house, with its stately walled gardens, was built up from the faithful memories of his childhood, just as are the dream houses to which we go back oftenest in our sleep. But there are other dreams in which we discover and explore buildings that are quite unlike these familiar places, and unlike anything that we have ever known by day. I am not thinking of the creations of fevered dreams, or of such monstrous inventions of drugged sleep as some of those described by de Quincey, but only of things that we may meet with in the course of ordinary dreams of healthy sleep. In some of these ordinary dreams imagination forsakes altogether the familiar lines of the architecture that we are accustomed to, and boldly creates for itself original buildings that seem to the dreamer at least to be new and noble in design. A museum, vast and splendid, with reading-rooms and stately galleries, and a new national picture gallery with great entrance doors, that open wide above broad curving flights of steps rising from a street thronged with traffic, have become familiar places in my dreams. Their lofty corridors and great staircases and doorways seem to be constructed as many dream buildings are, for us to fly in, rather than to walk in.

They seem also to have a gayer atmosphere than that of our real museums, and as I have entered their doors I have said to myself, "I remember this pleasant place - I know that here I shall be happy".

2 De Quincey, "Confessions".

All of us who know a particular dream country well, know the delight with which we recognise some especial characteristic landmark that has come to have associations of its own for us in this dream world. I do not know how far a great story-teller needs to experience the sensations that he writes of; in the "Brushwood Boy," Mr. Kipling has described with the wonderful air of truth that he is master of, the emotion of pleasure that such recognition brings, and also the curious way in which certain elements of a dream will persist for years in our dreams until they may even become factors of importance in our waking as well as in our sleeping hours. No doubt others have had experiences similar to those of the boy who constantly "found himself sliding into dreamland by the same road - a road that ran along a beach near a pile of brushwood. To the right ran the sea, sometimes at full tide, sometimes withdrawn to the very horizon; but he knew it for the same sea. By that road he would travel over a swell of rising ground covered with short withered grass, into valleys of wonder and unreason."1 The boy in this story was not singular in having a definite dream spot which came to be the "jumping-off" place for all his best dreams.

Many dreamers find that they have some such starting-place, and indeed Mr. Kipling's story would not seem as convincing as it does if it were simply a fanciful creation, unrelated to real experiences shared by other dream adventurers.

Many years ago a friend gave me the following account of a recurrent place dream which seems to have affected not only her dream life but also her normal waking life. "You know," she wrote, "that I live in sight of a wide plain stretching away to very distant hills. The plain is always changing with changing lights and shadows. Ton can watch it best from certain high open places where the woods end and the uplands begin. A path through the woods comes out on to one of these open places. Standing there you look out over the wide distance of the plain, east and west and north. Long ago I found that this particular spot with this view of the plain came constantly into my dreams. They had a way of forming round it. The dreams varied very much, but I noticed that all those that I liked best - the dreams that led to fine adventures - began there. By degrees I came to feel that just as the happiest dreams started in that place, anything supremely good that might come into my life, and the greatest of its adventures, would surely begin there, too.

1 Rudyard Kipling, "A Day's Work".

"The place of dreams gradually became a curious sort of touchstone for the people who came about me and who cared for me. 'I shall not,' I said to myself in the rashness of my confident youth, 'marry anyone who does not find his own way to the dream place, and understand its significance.' I should not be writing this to you if my dream story had ended differently. When after months of separation . . . came, and led me straight to the dream place, without word or sign from me, I knew that my dreams had been true in their foreshadowing, and that they were now at last to be perfectly fulfilled".

This account was given by my friend as an instance of what she regarded as a series of prophetic dreams. It may be so, but it seems to me rather an instance of the strong influence that a recurrent place dream may have even upon our waking mind. The effect of a dream which persists in this way, and which repeats itself as an echo does, becomes intensified by the fact of repetition. The series of dreams which extended over many months had evidently strongly affected my friend's waking and sleeping thoughts. Thought-reading of a simple kind such as was here involved would be no difficult matter to the insight of love; love and comprehension went hand in hand in her lover's case, and I think that his intuitive perception of the trend of her thoughts led him without difficulty to her place of dreams.