This is a valuable addition to our understanding of Mark Twain. For two years after the death of his daughter in 1890 he lived in a self-induced dream state and kept his house in mourning. He saved himself from madness by writing and the themes of the dream stories he wrote questioned whether external reality was more valid than dream reality. The hero in these stories was plunged into disaster. His hair turned white with a consuming need to beg forgiveness of wife and daughter, not knowing what had gone wrong or how to make amends. A few years later Mark Twain wrote larger and larger doses of indignation directed against larger and larger people or governments. There is an interesting footnote about dreams that occur in romantic literature.