Dream Tales and Prose Poems eBook

But these evil outbursts were never coincident with the moments of aversion.  My mother always wore black, as though in mourning.  We were in fairly good circumstances, but we hardly knew any one.

II

My mother concentrated her every thought, her every care, upon me.  Her life was wrapped up in my life.  That sort of relation between parents and children is not always good for the children ... it is rather apt to be harmful to them.  Besides, I was my mother’s only son ... and only children generally grow up in a one-sided way.  In bringing them up, the parents think as much of themselves as of them....  That’s not the right way.  I was neither spoiled nor made hard by it (one or the other is apt to be the fate of only children), but my nerves were unhinged for a time; moreover, I was rather delicate in health, taking after my mother, whom I was very like in face.  I avoided the companionship of boys of my own age; I held aloof from people altogether; even with my mother I talked very little.  I liked best reading, solitary walks, and dreaming, dreaming!  What my dreams were about, it would be hard to say; sometimes, indeed, I seemed to stand at a half-open door, beyond which lay unknown mysteries, to stand and wait, half dead with emotion, and not to step over the threshold, but still pondering what lay beyond, still to wait till I turned faint ... or fell asleep.  If there had been a vein of poetry in me, I should probably have taken to writing verses; if I had felt an inclination for religion, I should perhaps have gone into a monastery; but I had no tendency of the sort, and I went on dreaming and waiting.

III

I have just mentioned that I used sometimes to fall asleep under the influence of vague dreams and reveries.  I used to sleep a great deal at all times, and dreams played an important part in my life; I used to have dreams almost every night.  I did not forget them, I attributed a significance to them, regarded them as fore-warnings, tried to divine their secret meaning; some of them were repeated from time to time, which always struck me as strange and marvellous.  I was particularly perplexed by one dream.  I dreamed I was going along a narrow, ill-paved street of an old-fashioned town, between stone houses of many stories, with pointed roofs.  I was looking for my father, who was not dead, but, for some reason or other, hiding away from us, and living in one of these very houses.  And so I entered a low, dark gateway, crossed a long courtyard, lumbered up with planks and beams, and made my way at last into a little room with two round windows.  In the middle of the room stood my father in a dressing-gown, smoking a pipe.  He was not in the least like my real father; he was tall and thin, with black hair, a hook nose, with sullen and piercing eyes; he looked about forty.  He was displeased at my having found him; and I too was far from being