Or I am in a strange house with an unknown party of
guests, and person after person comes up to tell me all kinds of
interesting facts and details. Or else, as often happens to me, I
meet people long since dead; I dream constantly, for instance,
about my father. I see him by chance at a railway station, we
congratulate ourselves upon the happy accident of meeting; he takes
my arm, he talks smilingly and indulgently; and the only way in
which the knowledge that he is dead affects the dream is that I
feel bewildered at having seen so little of him of late, and even
ask him where he has been for so long that we have not met oftener.
Very occasionally I hear music in a dream. I well remember hearing
four musicians with little instruments like silver flutes play a
quartet of infinite sweetness; but most of my adventures take place
either among fine landscapes or in familiar conversation.
At one time, as a child, I had an often repeated dream. We were
then living in an old house at Lincoln, called the Chancery. It was
a large rambling place, with some interesting medieval features,
such as a stone winding staircase, a wooden Tudor screen, built
into a wall, and formerly belonging to the chapel of the house,
There were, moreover, certain quite unaccountable spaces, where the
external measurements of passages did not correspond with the
measurement of rooms within. This fact excited our childish
imagination, and probably was the origin of the dream.
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