Meanwhile we return to friend Martin. In order to obtain some distraction, he undertook a cruise to Norrland and Norway, and expected to derive from it a real feeling of freedom and much pleasure. After some weeks I meet him in a street in Lund. "Have you had a pleasant journey?" I ask. "No; a devil's journey! I don't know what to believe. There is certainly some one who challenges me, and the fight is unequal. Listen! I went to Stockholm to amuse myself at the great exhibition, and though I have hundreds of friends there, I did not meet one. They were all in the country, and I found myself alone. I only stayed in my room one day, and was then turned out of it by a stranger to whom my brother, by mistake, had previously promised it. Ill-luck made me so stupid that I did not go and see the exhibition, and as I wandered about alone in the streets, suddenly a heavy hand fell on my shoulder. It was a very seriously disposed uncle of mine, whom I had not seen twice in my life, and who was the last man I wished to see. He invited me to spend the whole evening with him and his wife. I had to swallow everything I disliked. It was like witchcraft. Then I went on alone in a railway carriage for hundreds of miles, through scenery that was deadly dull. At Areskutan, the principal object of my excursion, there was only one hotel, and in this hotel all my antipathies had appointed a rendezvous. The Free Church pastor was feeding his flock there, and they were singing psalms morning, noon, and evening. It was enough to drive one wild, and yet it seemed quite natural. There was only one thing which seemed to me somewhat strange, or with a smack of the occult about it. That was, that in this quiet and well-kept hotel they were hammering up large boxes at night." "Over your head?" "Yes; just over! And, strangely enough, this hammering followed me to Norway. When I ask the hotel manager for an explanation, he declared he had heard nothing." "That is just like my own experience." "Yes." I would not have related these trivial and in themselves repellent stories, did not their very absurdity suggest the existence of a reality, which yet is neither real objectively nor a mere vision, but a phantasmagoria called up by the invisible powers, to warn, to teach, or to punish. This condition, called by the theosophists "Astralplanet," is also described by Swedenborg in the last part of his _Arcana_, "Visiones et Visa." There are two kinds of visionary states which are beyond nature, and in which I have been placed merely to experience what they are like, and what is to be understood by the expressions to be "rapt from the body," and "to be carried by the spirit" to another place. 1. A man is placed in a condition between sleep and waking; when he is in this state he seems to himself to be fully awake. This is the condition of being "rapt from the body," when one does not know whether one is in the body or out of the body.