Yet curiously enough he retained a dull impression of earthly events. All things actually done to his body coloured his dreams and decided his visions. As the fancies of the sleepers are determined by external actions, so as through a veil the wounded man faintly perceived the every-day life going on around his inert body. Through the chain extending from body to soul which held the latter captive to earth passed the thrills hinting at corporeal-existence, and these dominating his spirituality whirled him hither and thither, according as they happened. We in health feel in slumber the power of the unseen world guiding our every action; this man, in sickness dwelt, spiritually speaking, in the world of shadows, whereof we have no knowledge, and therefrom felt rather than saw the happening of earthly events which coloured his ghostly being. Oh those dreams, those visions apocalyptical, what agonies, what ecstacies, what feelings did they not beget? Now of earth, now of heaven, frequently of hell. Years afterwards, Jack remembering portions of these fantasies, would shudder and turn pale at the mere thought of having endured them. Wild as the visions of Ezekiel, gorgeous as the Arabian Nights, hideous as De Quincey's dreamings, delicate and spiritual as the songs of Aeriel, those chimeras, at once terrible and fascinating, racked his spiritual being with the pangs of pleasure and pain. As thus:-- ... Darkness! the infinite darkness of chaos, before the light-creating word was spoken by the Deity. Ages and ages and ages of gloom, of horror, of thick opacity. No light, no glimmer, no glow to break this all-pervading blackness. No earth beneath, no sky above, nothing but clinging gloom on all sides. So chill, so freezing--surely hell were not more terrible.... Ha! a burst of light penetrating the gloom. The word is spoken, the light is here.... Day divides itself from night ... from the womb of the darkness springs the faint radiance of dawn. Then the sun, the glorious sun, rises like a god to conquer the foul fiends of shadow. See how his arrows fly, golden and swift, from his never-empty bow ... east, west, north, south ... and the glory of light spreads over all creation.... I am borne along on the wings of a mighty wind blown from the gates of the dawn ... faster and faster and faster.... I swim through the crystalline air.... I poise myself like a bird in the opaline glories of a whirling sphere.... In the heart of the rainbow ... still no earth ... but air and the coruscation of infinite colours--red and yellow and green and blue.... They swirl in circles, they shoot on all sides from a spot of brilliance as the spokes of a wheel.... They range themselves in lines of ever-changing hues ... and now I am blown resistlessly onward by that mighty wind....