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* "Steepside"
** "Beyond the Sunset"
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serious contributions to literature have been similarly initiated;
and, more than once, fragments of poems, both in English and other
languages, have been heard or read by me in dreams. I regret much
that I have not yet been able to recover any one entire poem. My
memory always failed before I could finish writing out the lines,
no matter how luminous and recent the impressions made by them on
my mind.* However, even as regards verses, my experience has been
far richer and more successful than that of Coleridge, the only
product of whose faculty in this direction was the poetical fragment
Kubla Khan, and there was no scenic dreaming on the occasion, only
the verses were thus obtained; and I am not without hope that at
some future time, under more favorable conditions than those I now
enjoy, the broken threads may be resumed and these chapters of dream
verse perfected and made complete.

It may, perhaps, be worthy of remark that by far the larger number
of the dreams set down in this volume, occurred towards dawn;
sometimes even, after sunrise, during a "second sleep." A condition
of fasting, united possibly, with some subtle magnetic or other
atmospheric state, seems therefore to be that most open to impressions
of the kind. And, in this connection, I think it right to add that
for the past fifteen years I have been an abstainer from flesh-meats;
not a "Vegetarian," because during the whole of that period I have
used such