consciousness--moments so closely compacted that we think of them as
simultaneous--a coherent series of representations may take place,
involving what seem to be protracted periods for their unfoldment.
Every reader will easily call to mind dream experiences of this
character, in which the long-delayed dénouement was suggested and
prepared for by some extraneous sense-impression, showing that the
entire dream drama unfolded within the time it took that impression
to travel from the skin to the brain.

Hasheesh dreams, because they so often occur during some momentary
lapse from normal consciousness and are therefore measurable by its
time scale, are particularly rich in the evidence of the looping of
time. Fitzhugh Ludlow narrates, in _The Hasheesh Eater_, the dreams
that visited him in the brief interval between two of twenty or more
awakenings, on his walk homeward after his first experience with the
drug. He says, "I existed by turns in different places and various
states of being. Now I swept my gondola through the moonlit lagoons
of Venice. Now Alp on Alp towered above my view, and the glory of
the coming sun flashed purple light upon the topmost icy pinnacle.
Now in the primeval silence of some unexplored tropical forest I
spread my feathery leaves, a giant fern, and swayed and nodded in
the spice-gales over a river whose waves at once sent up clouds of
music and perfume. My soul changes to a vegetable essence, thrilled
with a strange and unimagined ecstasy."

Earlier in the same evening, when he was forced to keep awake in
order not to betray his condition, the dream time-scale appears to
have imposed itself upon his waking consciousness with the following
curious effect. A lady asked him some question connected with a
previous conversation. He says, "As mechanically as an automaton I