Experience C

The next night the other fellow had an explanation ready for my sufferings, of which I can only say that it had something to do with the navy, that it was sheer undiluted nonsense, had neither end nor beginning, and was insusceptible of being expressed in words. Myself knew this; yet I gave way, and my watcher was favoured with some references to the navy. Nor only that; the other fellow was annoyed - or I was annoyed - on two inconsistent accounts: first, because he had failed to make his meaning comprehensible; and second, because the nurse displayed no interest. The other fellow would have liked to explain further; but myself was much hurt at having been got into this false position, and would be led no further.

In cases A and C the illusion was amorphous. I knew it to be so, and yet succumbed to the temptation of trying to communicate it. In case B the idea was coherent, and I managed to hold my peace. Both consciousnesses, in other words, were less affected in case B, and both more affected in cases A and C. It is perhaps not always so: the illusion might be coherent, even practical, and the rational authority of the mind quite in abeyance. Would not that be lunacy ?

In case A I had an absolute knowledge that I was out of my mind, and that there was no meaning in my words; these were the very facts that I was anxious to conceal; and yet when I succumbed to the temptation of speaking, my face was convulsed with anger, and I wrung my watcher's wrist with cruelty. Here is action, unnatural and uncharacteristic action, flowing from an idea in which I had no belief, and which I had been concealing for hours as a plain mark of aberration. Is it not so with lunatics ?

I have called the one person myself and the other the other fellow. It was myself who spoke and acted; the other fellow seemed to have no control of the body or the tongue; he could only act through myself, on whom he brought to bear a heavy strain, resisted in one case, triumphant in the two others. Yet I am tempted to think that I know the other fellow; I am tempted to think he is the dreamer described in my Chapter on Dreams to which you refer. Here at least is a dream belonging to the same period, but this time a pure dream, an illusion, I mean, that disappeared with the return of the sense of sight, not one that persevered during waking moments, and while I was able to speak and take ray medicine. It occurred the day after case B and before case C.

Case D

In the afternoon there sprang up a storm of wind with monstrous clouds of dust; my room looked on a steep hill of trees whose boughs were all blowing in the same direction; the world seemed to pass by my windows like a mill-race. By this turmoil and movement I was confused, but not distressed, and surprised not to be distressed; for even in good health a high wind has often a painful influence on my nerves. In the midst of this I dozed off asleep. I had just been reading Scott's ' Life of Dryden,' had been struck with the fact that Dryden had translated some of the Latin hymns, and had wondered that I had never remarked them in his works. As soon as I was asleep I dreamed a reason why the sound of the wind and the sight of the flying dust had not distressed me. There was no wind, it seemed, no dust; it was only Dryden singing his translated hymns in one direction, and all those who had blamed and attacked him after the Revolution singing them in another. This point of the two directions is very singular and insane. In part it meant that Dryden was continuously flying past yet never passing my window in the direction of the wind and dust, and all his detractors similarly flying past yet not passing towards the other side.

But it applied, besides this, both to the words and to the music in a manner wholly insusceptible of expression.

That was a dream; and yet how exactly it reproduces the method of my other fellow while I was awake. Here is an explanation for a state of mind or body sought, and found, in a tissue of rabid, complicated, and inexpressible folly. - Yours very sincerely, Robert Louis Stevenson.