It is "those twin-jailers of the daring" thought, Knowledge and
Experience, that teach us surprise. We are surprised and incredulous
when, in novels and plays, we come across good men and women, because
Knowledge and Experience have taught us how rare and problematical is
the existence of such people. In waking life, my friends and
relations would, of course, have been surprised at hearing that I had
committed a murder, and was, in consequence, about to be hanged,
because Knowledge and Experience would have taught them that, in a
country where the law is powerful and the police alert, the Christian
citizen is usually pretty successful in withstanding the voice of
temptation, prompting him to commit crime of an illegal character.

But into Dreamland, Knowledge and Experience do not enter. They stay
without, together with the dull, dead clay of which they form a part;
while the freed brain, released from their narrowing tutelage, steals
softly past the ebon gate, to wanton at its own sweet will among the
mazy paths that wind through the garden of Persephone.

Nothing that it meets with in that eternal land astonishes it because,
unfettered by the dense conviction of our waking mind, that nought
outside the ken of our own vision can in this universe be, all things
to it are possible and even probable. In dreams, we fly and wonder
not--except that we never flew before. We go naked, yet are not
ashamed, though we mildly wonder what the police are about that they
do not stop us. We converse with our dead, and think it was unkind
that they did not come back to us before. In dreams, there happens
that which human language cannot tell. In dreams, we see "the light
that never was on sea or land," we hear the sounds that never yet were
heard by waking ears.