of dreams.  I explain it thus:—­The soul has a twofold life, a lower and a higher.  In sleep the soul is liberated from the constraint of the body, and enters, as an emancipated being, on its divine life of intelligence.  Then, as the noble faculty which beholds objects that truly are—­the objects in the world of intelligence—­ stirs within, and awakens to its power, who can be astonished that the mind which contains in itself the principles of all events, should, in this its state of liberation, discern the future in those antecedent principles which will constitute that future?  The nobler part of the mind is thus united by abstraction to higher natures, and becomes a participant in the wisdom and foreknowledge of the gods . . . .  The night-time of the body is the day-time of the soul.”

But I have no desire to multiply citations, nor to vex the reader with hypotheses inappropriate to the design of this little work.  Having, therefore, briefly recounted the facts and circumstances of my experience so far as they are known to myself, I proceed, without further commentary, to unroll my chart of dream-pictures, and leave them to tell their own tale.

—­A.B.K.

I. The Doomed Train*

I was visited last night by a dream of so strange and vivid a kind that I feel impelled to communicate it to you, not only to relieve my own mind of the impression which the recollection of it causes me, but also to give you an opportunity of finding the meaning, which I am sill far too much shaken and terrified to seek for myself.

It seemed to me that you and I were two of a vast company of men and women, upon all of whom, with the exception of myself—­for I was there voluntarily—­sentence of death had been passed.  I was sensible of the knowledge—­how obtained I know not—­that this terrible doom had been pronounced by the official agents of some new reign of terror.  Certain I was that none of the party had really been guilty of any crime deserving of death; but that the penalty had been incurred through

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* This narrative was addressed to the friend particularly referred 
to in it.   The dream occurred near the close of 1876, and on the 
eve, therefore, of the Russo-Turkish war, and was regarded by us 
both as having relation to a national crisis, of a moral and spiritual 
character, our interest in which was so profound as to be destined 
to dominate all our subsequent lives and work.  (Author’s Note.)
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their connection with some regime, political, social or religious, which was doomed to utter destruction.  It became known among us that the sentence was about to be carried out on a colossal scale; but we remained in absolute ignorance as to the place and method of the intended execution.  Thus far my dream gave me no intimation of the horrible scene which next burst on me,—­a scene which strained to their utmost tension every sense of sight, hearing and touch, in a manner unprecedented in any dream I have previously had.