MY FEVER I HAVE been all my life what Nathaniel Hawthorne calls "a devoted epicure of my own emotions," and this in a manner which I have never heard any one else express as their own experience. Nothing is more common than to hear of a man having no other companion than his own thoughts, and in this way people talk of creating a world within themselves, and fancy they have made a very grand creation. Now I have no wish to impugn the beauty of their peculiar worlds, but I wish to express a difference between such people's dreaming and my own, which is this, that, as in their case they themselves remain the chief and ruler as it were over their so created kingdoms, marshalling their thoughts and bringing them up as in battalia to fight on any particular side, in my case, on the contrary, you subside, and lose all personal identity, every one of your thoughts acting for itself without any exertion of your will to call it into being, or being so to act-yet are you not so dead asleep but that the knowledge of your own existence is still present with you between dream and reality, and a power to observe or contemplate lazily these thoughts, which can no longer be called yours, together |