This other life which palpitates in us is often more engrossing to us than our public life, and always more fickle. It has no bounds, so far as supply of incident and vision is concerned: but is absolutely limited (as much as is our physical life) in its extent of influence. Its scope is for ourselves alone. Our designs are made and our actions prepared in this domain of our dark fancy, and the adventures we there conceive only lose in richness and range when they are translated into physical terms. Of that realm we are absolute master, and we rule our universe thence. In it time and space both bow at our behest. By a simple whim we transpose seasons in a moment, that we may inhabit tropics and the frozen north at once. Elements and creatures and things are at our mercy. In this world, and only in this world, are we given to know freedom and omnipotence. How do things go in this secret and magical realm of ours, where we have power to work the miracles denied us in daily life? There we can love and hate, as we would wish to do, physically, can taste the fill of love's joys, and all of ambition or of crime. We can change our shape, attend the marvellous revels of fairy-land, witness horrible massacres, contemplate the incredible clash of suns. In this our private world neither days nor hours exist to limit us. We can live a thousand centuries in a moment, or spin out a moment across unending years. This dream-control of matter empowers us somewhat to understand the terrible play of events across eternity and the infinite, for it must proceed rather in the same manner: and since the thousand flying shades of chaos can be reflected in our subconsciousness, it follows that our fancy and our dreams must be made of the same stuff as the nameless force which rules the universe. The forest giant also had its life in a dream--a life which seemed to last for more than seventy centuries, in the precise surroundings wherein stood this substantial ghost. The dream which made it did not fade wholly with its death, for to my fancy clouds of wood-dust, with their sad musty taste, seemed yet to float after its fall over the vacant place where the tree had stood. My memories of the landscape in which the dream had passed endured after the ending of the dream. Birds seemed to fly over the prostrate giant, and thousands of busy insects flitted about its hollow trunk. The sound of the water came yet to me from far off, while the sunlight was golden where the tree had breathed, and night drew its dark curtain round the spot. A mighty rumour filled the space about--for in the subtle world of dream lively truth is given by our imagination to shapes and sounds and smells, which become ours to create, to destroy, or to revive at will.