“No.” She lingered out the word in dreamy absence, as if what they had been saying had already passed from her thought.
“But, Miss Gerald,” Lanfear ventured, “have these impressions of yours grown more definite—fuller, as you say—of late?”
“My impressions?” She frowned at him, as if the look of interest, more intense than usual in his eyes, annoyed her. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Lanfear felt bound to follow up her lead, whether she wished it or not. “A good third of our lives here is passed in sleep. I’m not always sure that we are right in treating the mental—for certainly they are mental—experiences of that time as altogether trivial, or insignificant.”
She seemed to understand now, and she protested: “But I don’t mean dreams. I mean things that really happened, or that really will happen.”
“Like something you can give me an instance of? Are they painful things, or pleasant, mostly?”
She hesitated. “They are things that you know happen to other people, but you can’t believe would ever happen to you.”
“Do they come when you are just drowsing, or just waking from a drowse?”
“They are not dreams,” she said, almost with vexation.
“Yes, yes, I understand,” he hesitated to retrieve himself. “But I have had floating illusions, just before I fell asleep, or when I was sensible of not being quite awake, which seemed to differ from dreams. They were not so dramatic, but they were more pictorial; they were more visual than the things in dreams.”