and to throw upon the events and vicissitudes of a career filled
with bewildering situations, a light which, like sunshine, has
penetrated to the very causes and springs of circumstance, and has
given meaning and fitness to much in my life that would else have
appeared to me incoherent or inconsistent.

I have no theory to offer the reader in explanation of my faculty,
--at least in so far as its physiological aspect is concerned.
Of course, having received a medical education, I have speculated
about the modus operandi of the phenomenon, but my speculations
are not of such a character as to entitle them to presentation in
the form even of an hypothesis. I am tolerably well acquainted
with most of the propositions regarding unconscious cerebration,
which have been put forward by men of science, but none of these
propositions can, by any process of reasonable expansion or
modification, be made to fit my case. Hysteria, to the multiform
and manifold categories of which, medical experts are wont to refer
the majority of the abnormal experiences encountered by them, is
plainly inadequate to explain or account for mine. The singular
coherence and sustained dramatic unity observable in these dreams,
as well as the poetic beauty and tender subtlety of the instructions
and suggestions conveyed in them do not comport with the conditions
characteristic of nervous disease. Moreover, during the whole period
covered by these dreams, I have been busily and almost continuously
engrossed with scientific and literary pursuits demanding accurate
judgment and complete self-possession and rectitude of mind. At
the time when many of the most vivid and remarkable visions occurred,
I was following my course as a student at the Paris Faculty of
Medicine, preparing for examinations, daily visiting hospital wards
as dresser, and attending lectures. Later, when I had taken my