"Then, you set down all dreams to some physical cause?"
"Certainly," said I; "though the character of the dream will be shaped according to our waking thoughts."
"Well, yes," he replied, "generally it is so. I myself once used to have those sort of dreams. But have you never met with a patient who lived two separate existences, whose spirit during sleep wandered into those realms allotted to it; returning upon waking to the body, there to drag out a wretched existence in the world, among the hum of men, and pass his melancholy hours longing for the night, when his spirit would be again set free from its prison, to wander unrestrained through those realms of space untrodden by mortal foot?"
"Never," I replied; "and if I were to meet with a man who imagined he passed two different existences, what proof have I that his dreams are nothing more than imagination? What proof have I that he really does live two separate lives?"
"Proof such as you would desire to have I admit is difficult; but let us suppose a case. What would you say if, in the course of a life-time's experience, you were to find some few, very rare, cases of men as I describe, who believe, as you would say, that their spirit during sleep leaves the body and revels in a world of its own. That you were to read of some few other cases of the same sort that have occurred now and then at rare intervals since the world began, and that the written description of that abode unknown to mortal tread, were to tally in every particular with the descriptions you yourself received from some of your patients?"
"Well," I replied, "I should say, either that my patients had been reading these old legends until their brains were turned, or that it was a malady, and, like all other maladies, was manifested by certain special symptoms. Hence the similarity of the descriptions."
"I knew that would be your reply," he observed. "Doctor, doctor," he continued, shaking his head, "you have a great deal to learn."
"Have you, then," I enquired, "ever met with a man of that sort?"
"I know one. What should you say, doctor, if I myself was one of those men?"
"You! I should say that your imagination deluded you, that your present ill state of health is sufficient to account for any freak of the brain, however eccentric."