Page 668 - the-idiot

or whether they were only pretending not to know your
hiding-place; then you thought of another plan and hood-
winked them once again. You remember all this quite
clearly, but how is it that your reason calmly accepted all
the manifest absurdities and impossibilities that crowded
into your dream? One of the murderers suddenly changed
into a woman before your very eyes; then the woman was
transformed into a hideous, cunning little dwarf; and you
believed it, and accepted it all almost as a matter of course—
while at the same time your intelligence seemed unusually
keen, and accomplished miracles of cunning, sagacity, and
logic! Why is it that when you awake to the world of reali-
ties you nearly always feel, sometimes very vividly, that the
vanished dream has carried with it some enigma which you
have failed to solve? You smile at the extravagance of your
dream, and yet you feel that this tissue of absurdity con-
tained some real idea, something that belongs to your true
life,—something that exists, and has always existed, in your
heart. You search your dream for some prophecy that you
were expecting. It has left a deep impression upon you, joy-
ful or cruel, but what it means, or what has been predicted
to you in it, you can neither understand nor remember.
The reading of these letters produced some such ef-
fect upon the prince. He felt, before he even opened the
envelopes, that the very fact of their existence was like a
nightmare. How could she ever have made up her mind to
write to her? he asked himself. How could she write about
that at all? And how could such a wild idea have entered her
head? And yet, the strangest part of the matter was, that