Page 572 - the-idiot

‘It puzzles me much to think how on earth the prince
guessed yesterday that I have had bad dreams. He said to
me, ‘Your excitement and dreams will find relief at Pav-
lofsk.’ Why did he say ‘dreams’? Either he is a doctor, or else
he is a man of exceptional intelligence and wonderful pow-
ers of observation. (But that he is an ‘idiot,’ at bottom there
can be no doubt whatever.) It so happened that just before
he arrived I had a delightful little dream; one of a kind that I
have hundreds of just now. I had fallen asleep about an hour
before he came in, and dreamed that I was in some room,
not my own. It was a large room, well furnished, with a cup-
board, chest of drawers, sofa, and my bed, a fine wide bed
covered with a silken counterpane. But I observed in the
room a dreadful-looking creature, a sort of monster. It was
a little like a scorpion, but was not a scorpion, but far more
horrible, and especially so, because there are no creatures
anything like it in nature, and because it had appeared to
me for a purpose, and bore some mysterious signification.
I looked at the beast well; it was brown in colour and had
a shell; it was a crawling kind of reptile, about eight inches
long, and narrowed down from the head, which was about a
couple of fingers in width, to the end of the tail, which came
to a fine point. Out of its trunk, about a couple of inches be-
low its head, came two legs at an angle of forty-five degrees,
each about three inches long, so that the beast looked like a
trident from above. It had eight hard needle-like whiskers
coming out from different parts of its body; it went along
like a snake, bending its body about in spite of the shell it
wore, and its motion was very quick and very horrible to

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