“How strangely you talk!” she answered, in a sharp tone. “I don’t find very much difference between this place and the earth, as you call it, except that I am more uncomfortable here, because everything is so flighty and uncertain.” “Yes, go on.” “I never know in the morning who will be sitting next me in the evening. They come and go.” “And what do you eat?” “The same old things--meat and potatoes, and pies and puddings.” “And you still eat these things?” “Why, yes; don’t you?” I hardly knew how to reply. Had I told her what my life here really was, she would no more have understood than she would have understood two years ago, when we lived in the same city on earth, had I told her then what my real mental life was. So I said: “I have not much appetite.” She looked at me as if she distrusted me in some way, though why I could not say. “Are you still interested in philosophy?” she asked. “Yes. Perhaps that is why I don’t get hungry very often.” “You were always a strange man.” “I suppose so. But tell me, Mrs. ----, do you never feel a desire to leave all this behind?” “To leave all what behind?” “Why, boarding-houses and uncongenial people, and meat and potatoes, and pies and puddings, and the shadows of material things in general.” “What do you mean by ‘the _shadows_ of material things’?” “I mean that these viands and pastries, which you eat and do not enjoy, are not real. They have no real existence.” “Why!” she exclaimed, “have you become a Christian Scientist?” At this I laughed heartily. Was one who denied the reality of astral food in the astral world a Christian Scientist, because the Christian Scientists denied the reality of material food in the material world? The analogy tickled my fancy. “Let me convert you to Christian Science, then,” I said. “No, sir!” was her sharp response. “You never succeeded in convincing me that there was any truth in your various fads and philosophies. And now you tell me that the food I eat is not real.” I puzzled for a moment, trying to find a way by which the actual facts of her condition could be brought home to the mind of this poor woman. Finally I hit upon the right track. “Do you realise,” I said, “that you are only dreaming?” “What!” she snapped at me. “Yes, you are dreaming. All this is a dream--these boarding-houses, _et cetera_.” “If that is so, perhaps you would like to wake me up.” “I certainly should. But you will have to awaken yourself, I fancy. Tell me, what were your ideas about the future life, before you came out here?” “What do you mean by _out here_?” “Why, before you died!” “But, man, I am not dead!” “Of course you are not dead. Nobody is dead. But you certainly understand that you have changed your condition.” “Yes, I have noticed a change, and a change for the worse.” “Don’t you remember your last illness?” “Yes.” “And that you passed out?” “Yes, if you call it that.” “You know that you have left your body?”