influence over me. If I were left alone in a room for long, I
remember that, when gazing at lifeless objects such as pieces of
furniture, and concentrating my attention upon them, I would
suddenly shriek out with fright, because they seemed to me alive.
Even during the latest years of my boyhood, not a night passed
without my waking out of some ghostly dream and uttering the most
frightful shrieks, which subsided only at the sound of some human
voice. The most severe rebuke or even chastisement seemed to me
at those times no more than a blessed release. None of my
brothers or sisters would sleep anywhere near me. They put me to
sleep as far as possible away from the others, without thinking
that my cries for help would only be louder and longer; but in
the end they got used even to this nightly disturbance.

In connection with this childish terror, what attracted me so
strongly to the theatre--by which I mean also the stage, the
rooms behind the scenes, and the dressing-rooms--was not so much
the desire for entertainment and amusement such as that which
impels the present-day theatre-goers, but the fascinating
pleasure of finding myself in an entirely different atmosphere,
in a world that was purely fantastic and often gruesomely
attractive. Thus to me a scene, even a wing, representing a bush,
or some costume or characteristic part of it, seemed to come from
another world, to be in some way as attractive as an apparition,
and I felt that contact with it might serve as a lever to lift me
from the dull reality of daily routine to that delightful region
of spirits. Everything connected with a theatrical performance
had for me the charm of mystery, it both bewitched and fascinated
me, and while I was trying, with the help of a few playmates, to
imitate the performance of Der Freischutz, and to devote myself