Now instantly, these various faces turn: see me: become one in a shrivel of horror.
I stand still. Their variance has rotted all away. They are one.... Mildred and mother and the others ... in a rigid gaze at me, in a cold terror rising from their sight.
“Well, it is I: only I.” Their faces do not move, they have not heard me.
But their stark death, making them one, moves. They rise to their feet. Mildred and Philip, faces fixed on me, retreat: Mr. Fayn and my father move aside. They huddle together in a single group. Six various bodies crowded close and one, in a shrivel of horror.
I go forward. My hands are forward and I am near to them. They do not stir. With my hand I touch the cheek of Mildred. With my hand I touch the hand of my mother. My hands go forward as through an impalpable light! I sweep with maddened arms about their bodies: my arms, unhindered, draw in on themselves. They stand stark huddled, their eyes fixed upon mine: and my arms thresh through space!
Fear is full gathered in my throat. I shriek. I shriek, and thresh with unresisted arms....
b
I AWOKE crying out.... Very warm, close-bundled, I cry as with the toothless hollow mouth of a babe. I cry and yet there is no sound. I stop. I am more awake. My opening eyes perceive a world that whirls in mazing colors and threatens to break in. This delirious dance subsides. I am quiet in my bed and the dark air lies quiet all about me. I know my body, I know my sheets and covers, I know my room, my open window: the city, purple and encaverned pours through the window into my room. The room all this time has slumbered quietly while I left it, and have come back to it. Swift fears start still from my muscles and my nerves, like discovered stowaways of that journey whence I am back in my room.
And then I knew my Dream, and my mind was stripped of space and time as I tried to face it.
—There is revelation in the Dream! Of that I was convinced. Let me explore its strangely shifting realm. But my mind could not enter. There, stript for action, it pounded at the gate, and it could not enter. I am inside the revealing realm of my Dream. But what good is that, since my mind cannot enter?