Or was it overnight? I could not lose that feeling that time had passed by since my last contact with ordinary life. It was as though, somewhere and somehow, I had lived for weeks or months in some new plane, and forgotten it. I felt richer and older than I had once felt, and the things I had been remembering seemed remote.
At that moment, a chance strain from the machine in my living room brought back a whole new group of vivid impressions, strange and yet in a sense more familiar than my memories of Melbourne. They opened up to me a different life in which I seemed to have participated by chance, and a life which had, at first sight, no point of contact with the reality to which I had returned....
A Chance Strain from Grieg
I recalled waking up in another place, on a long slope of green hill that overlooked a valley. It was dawn again. The sun was just rising over the crest of the hill behind me, and it threw long shadows across the grass from the tall, slender trees along the summit. Down in the valley a broad, clean river of clear water followed the curve of the hill until it disappeared from sight. There were other hills beyond the river, all with the same long, simple slope of grass; and, beyond the hills, there were the tops of blue mountains, swathed in white morning mist.
It was a strange place. Its strangeness consisted in a subtle appearance of order and care, as though a gardener or an army of gardeners had arranged and tended the whole vast sweep of landscape for years. It was uncultivated and deserted as waste land, but as well trimmed, in spite of its spaciousness, as a lawn.
The morning was very warm. I was not conscious of any chill in the air. I was clothed only in short trousers, such as athletes wear, and a short belted tunic without sleeves and loose—both of them indescribably soft and comfortable.
I was aware of the strangeness of my awakening, but I seemed to have no definite recollection of falling asleep. I felt that I had come there during my sleep under unusual circumstances and from a very different life, but the thought didn't disturb me or trouble my mind in any way. My chief emotion was a curious feeling of expectancy. I knew that I was about to have some new and curious experience, something not trivial, and I was eager to meet it.
I lay there for awhile, drinking in the beauty of the morning, and breathing an air of miraculous purity and freshness. Finally I stood up, light and conscious of a sudden grace, aware for the first time, in its departure, of the awkwardness and weight which ordinarily attend our movements on earth. It was as if some of the earth's gravity had been lost.
For a while I examined the valley, but I saw no sign of life there. Then I turned and went slowly up the hill, the sunlight falling warmly on my body, and my feet sinking sensuously in the deep grass.