I seemed swinging in a mighty rhythm through orbit vastness.
Sparkling points of light spluttered and shot past me. They were
stars, I knew, and flaring comets, that peopled my flight among the
suns. As I reached the limit of my swing and prepared to rush back
on the counter swing, a great gong struck and thundered. For an
immeasurable period, lapped in the rippling of placid centuries, I
enjoyed and pondered my tremendous flight.

But a change came over the face of the dream, for a dream I told
myself it must be. My rhythm grew shorter and shorter. I was
jerked from swing to counter swing with irritating haste. I could
scarcely catch my breath, so fiercely was I impelled through the
heavens. The gong thundered more frequently and more furiously. I
grew to await it with a nameless dread. Then it seemed as though I
were being dragged over rasping sands, white and hot in the sun.
This gave place to a sense of intolerable anguish. My skin was
scorching in the torment of fire. The gong clanged and knelled.
The sparkling points of light flashed past me in an interminable
stream, as though the whole sidereal system were dropping into the
void. I gasped, caught my breath painfully, and opened my eyes.
Two men were kneeling beside me, working over me. My mighty rhythm
was the lift and forward plunge of a ship on the sea. The terrific
gong was a frying-pan, hanging on the wall, that rattled and
clattered with each leap of the ship. The rasping, scorching sands
were a man's hard hands chafing my naked chest. I squirmed under
the pain of it, and half lifted my head. My chest was raw and red,
and I could see tiny blood globules starting through the torn and
inflamed cuticle.

"That'll do, Yonson," one of the men said. "Carn't yer see you've