He had been dreaming for a long time; but at first he had not understood that it was all a dream. It had been too real. When he realized that it was only a dream, he began, as dreamers do, to fight for wakefulness. But sleep held him stubbornly.
His dream was long; it dragged interminably. An endless procession of scenes and events harassed his troubled slumbers. He appeared in these scenes, participated in these events. He was at the same time an actor in his dream, and a spectator.
Some portions of the dream were gay, some were somber; some were happy, some were tragic. But over gay and somber, happy and tragic, there hung an uneasy Cloud. It haunted and harassed him. He tried to escape from this dark Cloud, but he could not. Thus his dream was one long, futile struggle....
II
When the dream began, Barnard seemed in it to be a boy. Yet as an actor in the dream, he felt himself neither boy nor man, simply James Barnard. He was—identity. He was himself.
It was in one of the earliest scenes of his dream that he first discovered the threatening Cloud which was to shadow all the rest.
He seemed to be running desperately after an omnibus, with a door in its rear end. He pursued it at the height of his speed; and yet it drew continually further away, and at length disappeared, in a hazy fashion, at a great distance from him. When at last he abandoned the pursuit, his chest seemed like to burst with his labored breathing.
Two faces looked back at him from the rear windows of this omnibus; and a hand waved through the open door. And above the omnibus, smoothly, and without effort, moved a faint shadow of misty Cloud. It seemed to Barnard to grow darker as the omnibus drew further and further away; and when the vehicle disappeared, the Cloud remained for a moment in his sight before it, too, vanished. There was something menacing about this drifting mist. Barnard thought of it, in his dream, as The Threat.
When the omnibus was gone, he remembered the faces which had looked back at him, and recognized them. His mother, and his brother. His brother was a baby.
Barnard, in his dream, felt an overpowering terror at this recognition, and he shuddered.