wandered through all nightmarish madness, without coherence, without
continuity of scene, event, or person.

My method of mechanical hypnosis was the soul of simplicity. Sitting
with folded legs on my straw-mattress, I gazed fixedly at a fragment of
bright straw which I had attached to the wall of my cell near the door
where the most light was. I gazed at the bright point, with my eyes
close to it, and tilted upward till they strained to see. At the same
time I relaxed all the will of me and gave myself to the swaying
dizziness that always eventually came to me. And when I felt myself sway
out of balance backward, I closed my eyes and permitted myself to fall
supine and unconscious on the mattress.

And then, for half-an-hour, ten minutes, or as long as an hour or so, I
would wander erratically and foolishly through the stored memories of my
eternal recurrence on earth. But times and places shifted too swiftly. I
knew afterward, when I awoke, that I, Darrell Standing, was the linking
personality that connected all bizarreness and grotesqueness. But that
was all. I could never live out completely one full experience, one
point of consciousness in time and space. My dreams, if dreams they may
be called, were rhymeless and reasonless.

Thus, as a sample of my rovings: in a single interval of fifteen minutes
of subconsciousness I have crawled and bellowed in the slime of the
primeval world and sat beside Haas--further and cleaved the twentieth
century air in a gas-driven monoplane. Awake, I remembered that I,
Darrell Standing, in the flesh, during the year preceding my
incarceration in San Quentin, had flown with Haas further over the
Pacific at Santa Monica. Awake, I did not remember the crawling and the
bellowing in the ancient slime. Nevertheless, awake, I reasoned that