TWO STORIES
477
there stood the child whose shoe it was, part of a dream the writer
had dreamed the night before. Dear God, how was such forgetful–
ness possible? In the middle of the night he had awakened, enchanted
and shaken by the mysterious power of his dream, had awakened
with the feeling of having had a significant and splendid experience–
and then he had presently gone to sleep again, and a single hour of
morning sleep had sufficed to wipe out the whole splendid experience
so that only at this second, wakened by the fleeting sight of the child's
foot, had he thought of it again. So fleeting, so transitory, so com–
pletely subject to chance were the deepest, the most wonderful ex–
periences of the soul! And look, even now he was not successful in
building up in his mind the whole of last night's dream. Only iso–
lated pictures, some of them unconnected, were still to be found,
some fresh and full of living radiance, others already gray and dusty,
already on the point of fading away. And yet what a beautiful, pro–
found, life-giving dream it had been! How his heart had beaten
when he first awoke in the night, enchanted and afraid like a child
on a holiday! How completely filled he had been with the lively
assurance that this dream had been a noble, profound, unforgettable,
never to be lost experience! And now, only a few hours later, all
that was left was these fragments, these few fading pictures, this
faint echo in his heart-all the rest was lost, gone, no longer alive!
All the same, these few bits at least had been rescued. The writer
immediately decided to search about in his memory for whatever
was left of the dream and write it down as truly and accurately as
possible. At once he took his notebook out of his pocket and made
the first entries in catch-words with the intention of establishing
if possible the structure and outline, the general shape of the dream.
But in this too he was unsuccessful. Neither beginning nor end could
now be distinguished, and he did not know where most of the re–
maining fragments fitted into the dream story. No, he would have
to set about it differently. He must, first of
all,
rescue what was with–
in reach, m st at once fix firmly the few unfaded images, above
all
the child's shoe, before they too, those timid magic birds, had fled.
Like an archeologist attempting to decipher a new-found in–
scription, starting with the few still recognizable letters or picto–
grams, so our man sought to read his dream by putting it together
piece by piece.
In the dream he had had something to do with a
girl,
a strange,
