At first, when I saw it stand out detail after detail in lifelike truthfulness, I felt in the presence of some supernatural power. But when I came to know the methods they had employed, it seemed as simple as a child’s puzzle. Every conclusion had been reached in the most scientific way. All the minutiæ of every dream had been faithfully recorded and microscopically examined. Then they were tabulated and compared with the most untiring industry. And out of the shapeless mass had come by the aid of their logical methods or dream-tests the clear, unquestionable truth. Their brilliant, but by no means reckless, imaginations did the rest, evolving order and lifelikeness out of seemingly barren and confused facts. It is true, they did not make any attempt at the chronology of the past; they had been able only to group the facts in great spaces of time, and in a certain order of development. Their minute knowledge of the evolution of life, and especially of human life, gave them the framework for this grouping. I was astonished at the quickness of their work, when I considered the fulness of the natural history of my mind and character; it seemed as if they should have taken years and not months to investigate with such care every atom and cell of the tissue of my brain. CHAPTER III SLEEP, REST, AND FLIGHT I COULD not but surrender myself into the hands of men whose wisdom seemed to me to approach omniscience; and this I was the more inclined to do that I felt, instead of exhaustion from their operations on my brain during sleep, the greatest sense of exhilaration I had ever experienced in my life. They acted on the principle of giving complete rest to one set of nerves and tissues by stimulating the others. They could produce the deepest sleep in all the brain- and nerve-centres by gathering the life-energy that remains during sleep into one minute point, which they stimulated by magnetism.