The old wonder stories of Wells and Verne, and of the pseudo-scientific
writers of the first part of this century have always appealed to me. I
had a vast collection of ancient volumes and tattered magazines, full
of those old stories, which I read and reread with passionate interest.
The rest of the world had forgotten them with the passing of the age of
science, but I found in them the priceless food of fancy.
Psychologists say that many children have dream companions of some
kind. They are very real entities of the child's imagination, playmates
of fancy. They usually fade and are forgotten as the adolescent child
becomes absorbed in the activities of life, and the imagination
atrophies.
Since the days of my earliest recollections, I have visited in the
world of my dreams a wonderful playmate. It is a girl, with dark brown
hair, deep, warm violet eyes, and clear skin, so I thought, slightly
tinged with green, though the lips were very red. I have always thought
that she was very beautiful, and she has always been very real to me.
And the vision did not fade as the years went by! Still I visited the
Green Girl, as I called her, in my fancy, and she replaced many of the
normal childhood interests that I might have had. It is because of her
that I have always been happiest when I was silent and alone, it is
because of my dreams that I have been inclined to avoid the society of
others.
The strange world of dreams in which I visited her was very real to
me, a place of weird wonders, sometimes of alien terrors, in which the
Green Girl and I wandered through interminable, astounding adventures.
And I have always had an unaccountable persuasion that it was a real
world, somewhere, through which my mind roamed in such delightful
fancies!
It was twenty years ago, when I was just five years old, that the Green
Girl first came into my dreams. Sam had rigged up, for my edification,
an old fashioned radio set, with headphones. In the long, lonely
silences of the warm Florida nights, when a less indulgent guardian
would have had me in bed, I sat up with those old phones on my ears,
exploring the ether, feeling near the infinite mystery of space. I
listened with childish intentness to the odd noises of the static,
eagerly dreaming of calls from other planets.
It was during one of those long still nights that I first entered that
world of fancy, and found--the Green Girl! It seemed that I heard first
a cry of delight in a silver voice, and then she was with me. She was
but a tiny sprite, smaller than myself. She seemed to stand before
me, smiling at me, tossing her dark curls, with the light of bright
intelligence in her blue-violet eyes. I loved her from the first. She
was very beautiful. Her skin had just a tinge of green, like a tinted
photograph; it did not seem a strange color. The vision was very real
to me.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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