‘I remember,’ said he, wrinkling his lids, ‘I remember a dream frequently dreamed when I was about six or seven years old; I used to wake wet and shaking. It was a simple dream of an interminable path between walls of white smooth stone. By that way one might walk to eternity, or space, or infinity. You understand?’
I nodded my head.
‘Remember, my boy, I find it hard work to prose – I would sooner be watching. The dream never came back to me after I was twelve years old, but since then I have had other dreams, as false to the Ten Commandments. I have seen things which Nature would spit out of her mouth. Yet each one has been threaded, each has been one of an interminable sequence. There’s a theory written under the letter D in a little book I used to keep when I first entered the bank, “A Theory concerning Dreams Expressed Algebraically”—the result of mental flatulency. So far are you clear?’
‘Yes,’ said I.
Walter Ramel (Walter de la Mare), ‘A Mote’, Cornhill Magazine, August 1896; Short Stories. 1895-1926, ed. Giles de la Mare, Giles de la Mare Publishers Limited, London, 1996, p. 415
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