Fourth Dimensional

Our Sage of Concord has declared that “Ideas are in the air;” that they range as they will, and at times of their own choosing; and he more than implies that none, even the greatest, need imagine that he, solely, is the host-elect of these travelers from the empyrean. I lean upon Emerson, and offer no further apology for the assumption that a visitant from the newly discovered (or re-discovered) realm of Psychics may recently have darkened my own humble door. It is true that, some weeks before this shadowing, I had been reading Frederick Myers’s Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. Still later, I had read the brief essay of one who with Science and Speculation at the helm, had, as it were, rounded a Mirage-Coast known as The Fourth Dimension. Finally, I had gone to sleep with a last vaguely questing thought hovering where a beloved image had receded (such years ago!) into the “dark backward and Abysm of Time.”With this accounting and this premise, may I offer what was offered to me (I have no other word than offered), in the last moment, or moments, preceding full waking-consciousness. It was scarcely light; but I rose and quickly recorded as much as I could remember of the dream-salutation just received. For the rest — for the lacunæ at which memory halted — both the ideas and the words seemed to evolve without will or invention of mine, — like those lines of writing in a sympathetic ink, which are a little “slower than the others to emerge from invisibility.”