To-morrow I LAY down at noonday on my green couch and I had a quaint dream. I have just awakened from it in a flush of languor and comfort. And the dream is vivid in my mind. I dreamed I was married and it was pink-and-pearl dawn in my married bed-room. And in the bed one inch away from mine was not my married husband but ‘another man.’ It was no man I can recall having seen. As I look back into the dream he seems of the nowhere, a stranger. But in the dream he was no stranger. I had crudely admitted him to my night. And I had just awakened in the pink-and-white dawn and was sitting silk-gowned and ruffle-haired in my bed, cross-legged like a tailor with my elbows on my knees and my chin on my palms, idly contemplating him. And he was lying in the other narrow bed contemplating me and smiling a little. He had nice teeth and yellowish hair. The crux of the dream was the sound ‘off-stage’ of the approaching footsteps of monsieur-the-husband. As it always is in the psychology of dreams the insistent thing in the situation was not the footsteps, nor even that they were approaching, but the sound: the elusive threat of their sound. He would presently discover us. Nobody appeared to care: not ‘another man’ A short-cut gently headlong dream. I was at once married, mixed adulterantly with an imperfect stranger and awaiting in pleasant mild anticipation, to match the pink-and-pearl of the summer dawn, the climax in the approaching sound of my husband’s footsteps. It was humorous and artistic. Unseemly preliminaries were done away with in that dream. I was given at once the one exciting worthwhile moment in it. Having no data as to what were my —a theme for idling speculation in a summer’s day— Also I wonder whence came that dream: so Unexpected: so Irrelevant to any thought in me: so Artistically Right: so Disgusting: so Dramatic: so quaintly Vulgar. A question: to which the one answer is that unanswerable answer to all questions, propounded by Mr.F.’s Aunt—‘There’s milestones on the Dover road.’ |