finish writing out the lines, no matter how luminous and recent the impressions made by them on my mind.* However, even as regards verses, my experience has been far richer and more successful than that of Coleridge, the only product of whose faculty in this direction was the poetical fragment Kubla Khan, and there was no scenic dreaming on the occasion, only the verses were thus obtained; and I am not without hope that at some future time, under more favorable conditions than those I now enjoy, the broken threads may be resumed and these chapters of dream verse perfected and made complete.

It may, perhaps, be worthy of remark that by far the larger number of the dreams set down in this volume, occurred towards dawn; sometimes even, after sunrise, during a “second sleep.”  A condition of fasting, united possibly, with some subtle magnetic or other atmospheric state, seems therefore to be that most open to impressions of the kind.  And, in this connection, I think it right to add that for the past fifteen years I have been an abstainer from flesh-meats; not a “Vegetarian,” because during the whole of that period I have used such

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* The poem entitled “A Discourse on the Communion of Souls; or, the 
Uses of Love between Creature and Creature, Being a part of the 
Golden Book of Venus,” which forms one of the appendices to “The 
Perfect Way,” would be an exception to this rule but that it was 
necessary for the dream to be repeated before the whole poem could 
be recalled.  (Ed.)
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animal produce as butter, cheese, eggs, and milk.  That the influence of fasting and of sober fare upon the perspicacity of the sleeping brain was known to the ancients in times when dreams were far more highly esteemed than they now are, appears evident from various passages in the records of theurgy and mysticism.  Philostratus, in his “Life of Apollonius Tyaneus,” represents the latter as informing King Phraotes that “the Oneiropolists, or Interpreters of Visions, are wont never to interpret any vision till they have first inquired the time at which it befell; for, if it were early, and of the morning sleep, they then thought that they might make a good interpretation thereof (that is, that it might be worth the interpreting), in that the soul was then fitted for divination, and disencumbered.  But if in the first sleep, or near midnight, while the soul was as yet clouded and drowned in libations, they, being wise, refused to give any interpretation.  Moreover, the gods themselves are of this opinion, and send their oracles only into abstinent minds.  For the priests, taking him who doth so consult, keep him one day from meat and three days from wine, that he may in a clear soul receive the oracles.”  And again, Iamblichus, writing to Agathocles, says:—­“There is nothing unworthy of belief in what you have been told concerning the sacred sleep, and seeing by means