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Page:Confessions of an English Hachish-Eater (1884).djvu/37

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English Hachish Eater
31

in gaps and supply or suggest motives which, in my dreams, were all haze and mystery.

Two of these dream stories I intend to give. In the following idyll I have only to a limited extent exercised the editorial function of pruning and elaborating. Had I allowed myself a greater degree of freedom, I should have made a better story of it. But, in that case, I should not have preserved the peculiar character of the apocalypse; and that, I think, is its flavour of dreamland. As it is, I am not certain that I have not gone too far. For instance, I was myself an actor in some of the scenes of the dream; and in writing it out I have abolished my own personality and told the tale in the third person, supplying names to all the characters. It will serve, however, as a specimen, although a faulty one, of some curious and not unpoetical imaginings. It appeared to me in the form of a succession of pictures, the personse of which were a young man, who was sometimes myself and sometimes another, an old