The unthinkable velocity of time in dreams may be inferred from the fact that between the moment of impact of an impression at the sense-periphery and its reception at the center of consciousness--moments so closely compacted that we think of them as simultaneous--a coherent series of representations may take place, involving what seem to be protracted periods for their unfoldment. Every reader will easily call to mind dream experiences of this character, in which the long-delayed dénouement was suggested and prepared for by some extraneous sense-impression, showing that the entire dream drama unfolded within the time it took that impression to travel from the skin to the brain. Hasheesh dreams, because they so often occur during some momentary lapse from normal consciousness and are therefore measurable by its time scale, are particularly rich in the evidence of the looping of time. Fitzhugh Ludlow narrates, in _The Hasheesh Eater_, the dreams that visited him in the brief interval between two of twenty or more awakenings, on his walk homeward after his first experience with the drug. He says, "I existed by turns in different places and various states of being. Now I swept my gondola through the moonlit lagoons of Venice. Now Alp on Alp towered above my view, and the glory of the coming sun flashed purple light upon the topmost icy pinnacle. Now in the primeval silence of some unexplored tropical forest I spread my feathery leaves, a giant fern, and swayed and nodded in the spice-gales over a river whose waves at once sent up clouds of music and perfume. My soul changes to a vegetable essence, thrilled with a strange and unimagined ecstasy." Earlier in the same evening, when he was forced to keep awake in order not to betray his condition, the dream time-scale appears to have imposed itself upon his waking consciousness with the following curious effect. A lady asked him some question connected with a previous conversation. He says, "As mechanically as an automaton I began to reply. As I heard once more the alien and unreal tones of my own voice, I became convinced that it was some one else who spoke, and in another world. I sat and listened: still the voice kept speaking. Now for the first time I experienced that vast change which hasheesh makes in all measurements of time. The first word of the reply occupied a period sufficient for the action of a drama; the last left me in complete ignorance of any point far enough back in the past to date the commencement of the sentence. Its enunciation might have occupied years. I was not in the same life which had held me when I heard it begun."