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“Every stage of human thinking might be defined by its relative position between waking life and the dream. … Everyone, sooner or later, with more or less persistence, comes to ponder this question: Is it I who do this dreaming? It is a question which in its countless aspects touches upon our reasons for living, the choice we make among our inner potentialities, the problem of knowledge, and that of the roots of poetry and its significance. No answer that would merely satisfy abstract thought can be given to these questions for they do not rise from the field of autonomic reflection within us, but seem to be presented by an undefinable reality greater than ourselves and which we cannot evade without loss to our inner life.
“Is it I who dream at night? or do I become the stage for something or someone else to unroll scenes, now ridiculous and anon filled with strange wisdom? When I lose control of those images which constitute the most secret, the least communicable part of my life, has this unplanned collection of dramas some significant relation to my destiny or to still other events beyond my ken? Or is it nothing more than an incoherent dance, the shameless monkeyshines of thought atoms giving free rein to absurd caprice?
“Even though patient observations, whether made on myself or borrowed from psychologists, show the connection between dream life and conscious experience, and I know the path of the dream in the last moments of its journey, I am still in the dark concerning its beginning; my dreams speak a language that moves me by its quality and by an apparent allusion to something very important and to which I feel closely linked. No psychological explanation throws any light on the nature of this language, nor on the verity of the allusions.
Still more mysterious than night dreams are those which follow me all day long, so close to the surface that the slightest shock brings them uppermost, and this existence gives still other signs of its permanence and fecund