I thought I was in my bed--a German one, for I was in Homburg vor der Höhe--yet I did not know exactly where I was. I at once perceived the anomaly, and was in great distress to know whether I was awake or in a dream. I seemed to be an invalid. I realized, or knew, that in another bed near mine was a nurse or attendant. I begged her to tell me if I were dreaming, and to awake me if I were. She tried to persuade me that I was in my ordinary life, awake. I was not at all satisfied. I arose and went into the street. There I met with two or three common men. I felt great hesitation in addressing them on such a singular subject, but told them that I was in distress because I feared that I was in a dream, and begged them to shake or squeeze my arm. I forget whether they complied, but I went on and met three gentlemen, to whom I made the same request. One at once promptly declared that he remembered me, saying that we had met before in Cincinnatti. He pressed my arm, but it had no effect. I began to believe that I was really awake. I returned to the room. I heard a child speaking or murmuring by the nurse. I asked her again to shake my hand. This she did so forcibly that I was now perfectly convinced that it was no dream. And the instant it came home to me that it was a reality, there seized me the thrill or feeling as of a coming nightmare--and I awoke! Reviewing my dream when awake, I had the deepest feeling of having been joué or played with by a master-mocker. I recalled that, when I rose in my night-robe from the bed, I did not dress--and yet found myself fully dressed when in the street. Then I remembered that when I returned to America, in 1879, I was in great apprehension lest I should have trouble and delay with our sixteen trunks, because there was under my charge a lady who was dying. To my great relief and amazement, the officer whose duty it was to search claimed me as an old acquaintance, who had met me and T. Buchanan Read, the poet, in Cincinnatti in 1864. But what impressed me most of all, at once, was that the whole was caused by, and was a keen and subtle mockery of my comments in my letter, of the other Ego, and of its sarcastic power. For I had been led, step by step, through the extremest doubt, to a full conviction of being awake, and then dismissed, as it were, with a snap or sneer into wakefulness itself!