into my dream are so much more knitted to my thought, that when I am dead they will have I am persuaded, my longest visit. When we are dead according to my belief, we live our lives backward for a certain number of years, treading the paths that we have trodden, growing young again, even childish again, till some attain an innocence that is no longer a mere accident of nature, but the human intellect's crowning achievement. It was at Coole that the first few simple thoughts that now, grown complex, through their contact with other thoughts, explain the world, came from beyond my own mind. I practised meditations, and these as I think so affected my sleep that I began to have dreams that differed from ordinary dreams in seeming to take place amid brilliant light, and by their invariable coherence, and certain half-dreams, if I can call them so, between sleep and waking. I have noticed that such experiences come to me most often amid distraction, at some time that seems of all times the least fitting, as though it were necessary for the exterior mind to be engaged elsewhere, and it was during 1897 and 1898, when I was always just arriving from or just setting out to some political meeting that the first dreams came. I was crossing a little stream near Inchy wood and actually in the middle of a stride from bank to bank, when an emotion never experienced before swept down upon me. I said "That is what the devout Christian feels, that is how he surrenders his will to the will of God." I felt an extreme surprise, for my whole imagination was preoccupied with the Pagan Mythology of Ancient Ireland; I was marking in red ink upon a large map every sacred mountain. The next morning I awoke near dawn, to hear a voice saying "The love of God is infinite for every human soul, because every human soul is unique, no other can satisfy the same need in God."
Lady Gregory and I had heard many tales of changelings, grown men and women as well as children, who as the people believe are taken by the Fairies, some spirit or inanimate object bewitched into their likeness remaining in their stead, and I constantly asked myself what reality there could be in these tales, often supported by so much testimony. I woke one night to find myself lying upon my back with all my limbs rigid, and to hear a voice which did not seem to be mine speaking through my lips. "We make an image of him who sleeps" it said "and it is not him who sleeps but it is like him who sleeps, and we call it Emmanuel." After many years that thought others often found as strangely being added to it, became
