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At Melcombe Regis, as at Weymouth, no one was stirring. The doors were
all carefully double-locked, The windows were covered by their shutters,
as the eyes by their lids. Every precaution had been taken to avoid
being roused by disagreeable surprises. The little wanderer was
suffering the indefinable depression made by a sleeping town. Its
silence, as of a paralyzed ants' nest, makes the head swim. All its
lethargies mingle their nightmares, its slumbers are a crowd, and from
its human bodies lying prone there arises a vapour of dreams. Sleep has
gloomy associates beyond this life: the decomposed thoughts of the
sleepers float above them in a mist which is both of death and of life,
and combine with the possible, which has also, perhaps, the power of
thought, as it floats in space. Hence arise entanglements. Dreams, those
clouds, interpose their folds and their transparencies over that star,
the mind. Above those closed eyelids, where vision has taken the place
of sight, a sepulchral disintegration of outlines and appearances
dilates itself into impalpability. Mysterious, diffused existences
amalgamate themselves with life on that border of death, which sleep is.
Those larvæ and souls mingle in the air. Even he who sleeps not feels a
medium press upon him full of sinister life. The surrounding chimera,
in which he suspects a reality, impedes him. The waking man, wending his
way amidst the sleep phantoms of others, unconsciously pushes back
passing shadows, has, or imagines that he has, a vague fear of adverse
contact with the invisible, and feels at every moment the obscure
pressure of a hostile encounter which immediately dissolves. There is
something of the effect of a forest in the nocturnal diffusion of
dreams.
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