I waited, in a strange revulsion of spirit; but the most singular thing is that the crowded table, which had been a few minutes before the most pathetic thing in the world, had become by the time that A——­ entered smiling, as irritating and annoying as ever; changed from the poor table where his earthly litter had accumulated, which he could touch no more for ever, into the table which he ought to have put straight long ago and should be ashamed of leaving in so vile a condition.

XVIII

I have had a night of strange and terror-haunted dreams.  Yesterday I was forced to work at full speed, feverishly and furiously for a great many hours, at a piece of work that admitted of no delay.  By the evening I was considerably exhausted, yet the work was not done.  I slept for an hour, and then settled down again and worked very late in the night, until it was finished.  Such a strain cannot be borne with impunity, and I never do such a thing except under pressure of absolute necessity.  I suppose that I contrived to inflame some delicate tissue of the brain, as the result was a series of intensely vivid dreams, with a strange quality of horror about them.  It was not so much that the incidents themselves were of a dreadful type, but I was overshadowed by a deep boding, a dull ache of the mind, which charged everything that I saw with a sense of fortuitous dismay.  I woke in that painful mood in which the mind is filled with a formless dread; and the sensation has hung about me, more or less, all day.

What a strange phenomenon it is that the sick mind should be able thus to paint its diseased fancies in the dark, and then to be dismayed at its own creations.  In one of my dreams, for instance, I seemed to wander in the bare and silent corridors of a great house.  I passed a small and sinister door, and was impelled to open it.  I found myself in a large oak-panelled room, with small barred windows admitting a sickly light.  The floor was paved with stone; and in the centre, built into the pavement, stood a large block of basalt, black and smooth, which was roughly carved into the semblance of a gigantic human head.  I stared at this for a long time, and then swiftly withdrew, overcome with horror which I could not translate into words.  All that I seemed to know was that some kind of shocking rites were here celebrated:  I did not know what they were, and there were no signs of anything; no instruments of death, no trace of slaughter; yet for all that I knew that the place stood for some evil mystery, and the very walls and floor seemed soaked with fear and pain.

That is the inexplicable part of dreams, that one should invent incidents and scenes of every kind, with no sense of invention or creation, with no feeling that one is able to control what one appears to hear or see; and then that in some other part of one’s mind, one should be moved and stirred by the appropriate emotions awakened by word or sight.  In waking hours one can be stirred, amused, grieved by the exercise of one’s imagination, but one is aware that it is imagination, and one does not lose the sense of responsibility, the consciousness of creation.