Written down as soon as possible
after awaking from the slumber during which they presented themselves,
these narratives, necessarily unstudied in style, and wanting in
elegance of diction, have at least the merit of fresh and vivid
colour; for they were committed to paper at a moment when the effect
and impress of each successive vision were strong and forceful on the
mind. . . .

The most remarkable features of the experiences I am about to record
are the methodical consecutiveness of their sequences, and the
intelligent purpose disclosed alike in the events witnessed and in the
words heard or read. . . . I know of no parallel to this phenomenon,
unless in the pages of Bulwer Lytton's romance entitled The Pilgrims
of the Rhine, in which is related the story of a German student
endowed with so marvellous a faculty of dreaming, that for him the
normal conditions of sleeping and waking became reversed; his true
life was that which he lived in his slumbers, and his hours of
wakefulness appeared to him as so many uneventful and inactive
intervals of arrest, occurring in an existence of intense and vivid
interest which was wholly passed in the hypnotic state. . . .

During the whole period covered by these dreams I have been busily and
almost continuously engrossed with scientific and literary pursuits,
demanding accurate judgment and complete self-possession and rectitude
of mind. At the time when many of the most vivid and remarkable
visions occurred I was following my course as a student at the Paris
Faculty of Medicine, preparing for examinations, daily visiting
hospital wards as dresser, and attending lectures. Later, when I had
taken my degree, I was engaged in the duties of my profession and in
writing for the Press on scientific subjects. Neither had I ever
taken opium, haschish, or other dream-producing agent. A cup of tea
or coffee represents the extent of my indulgences in this direction. I
mention these details in order to guard against inferences which might
otherwise be drawn as to the genesis of my faculty.

It may, perhaps, be worthy of notice that by far the larger number of
the dreams set down in this volume occurred towards dawn; sometimes
even, after sunrise, during a 'second sleep.' A condition of fasting,
united possibly with some subtle magnetic or other atmospheric state,
seems, therefore, to be that most open to impressions of the kind.

This is the account given by the late Dr. Anna Kingsford of the genesis
of her remarkable volume, Dreams and Dream-Stories; and certainly some of
the stories, especially those entitled Steepside, Beyond the Sunset, and
The Village of Seers, are well worth reading, though not intrinsically
finer, either in motive or idea, than the general run of magazine
stories. No one who had the privilege of knowing Mrs. Kingsford, who was
one of the brilliant women of our day, can doubt for a single moment that
these tales came to her in the way she describes; but to me the result is
just a little disappointing. Perhaps, however, I expect too much. There
is no reason whatsoever why the imagination should be finer in hours of
dreaming than in its hours of waking. Mrs. Kingsford quotes a letter
written by Jamblichus to Agathocles, in which he says: 'The soul has a
twofold life, a lower and a higher.