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William Gerhardie - Resurrection

I neither drink, nor take drugs, and all I brought to my bed was considerable nervous exhaustion which sleep was required to restore. And, unnoticed as always, I lapsed into sleep. I laboured in my dream. Relations, long dead, seemed to be quarrelling and engaging, here my sympathy, there requiring my indignation. It was our Petersburg house and yet it all happened in London; but such discrepancies do not trouble us in dreams. No pedantry on that plane!

Yes, there was certainly a great deal of commotion. And then, in the turmoil of it all, Susan gave
notice. During office hours I missed Patsy and found her helping cook to pack. I expressed indignant surprise that cook should call on the valuable time of my secretary to help her pack. But cook said, with quiet but overwhelming conviction, that surely, since she was leaving, all could help
her pack her things. My mother, for instance. After that I seemed to cease to understand things-not a frequent experience in dreams during which nothing seems singular.

But here - damn! - I knew it. Now I have gone and broken a tooth. What a nuisance. What a blasted nuisance ! This is what comes from helping cook pack. But what a, dreadful nuisance. Now I'll have to go and see the dentist. I examined the tooth : it was certainly broken, flopping hither and thither-strange, no pain. No pain at all. But how loose !

I seized hold of it and essayed to pull it, and it came out easily in a long sticky strand, like molten toffee.  Now this - it struck me was really strange, so strange that the dentist would scarcely believe it. It was comic. He would laugh. It was a joke-a dream. A dream of course ! I was dreaming it.

But then if I was still dreaming, why did I not wake ? But there! I I was awake, I knew, because I knew I was dreaming this about the tooth gone to molten toffee. Therefore, dreaming though I still was, I had but to wake to ascertain that my tooth was sound. Now wake, I said, and find there
is no need to worry about going to the dentist. And I woke.

But I woke with a start. Because I had stretched out my hand to press the switch of the lamp on the bookshelf over my bed, and instead found myself grasping the void, and myself suspended precariously in mid-air, perhaps on a level with the bookcase. The room, except for the glow
from the electric stove, was in darkness, but all around me was a milky pellucid light. I was that moment fully awake, and so fully conscious that I could not doubt my senses.

Astonished as I have never been before, amazed to the point of proud exhilaration, I said to myself : ' Fancy that ! Now would you have believed it ! Now this is something to tell !  And this is not a dream.'

It was just like the very things I did not and could not have believed : and here it was. It seemed to me almost ludicrous, a Maskelyne and Devant trick. And when had I ever bargained for conjurer's tricks, that this should happen to me, so remote in type and sympathies from that sort of thing, whatever it may be?

This went through my mind, although the suspension in mid-air did not last more than a few moments, during which I felt as if I were being suspended by a steel arm which held me rigid - me, in comparison, weighing the weight of a feather. Then with astounding swiftness, as if the steel force which held me rigid was electrified to a bout of energy by the sudden apprehension which succeeded my first moment of delighted astonishment, I was seized, pushed out horizontally, placed on my feet, and thrust forward with the gentle-firm hand of the monitor-' There you are, my good man, now you can proceed on your own'.

I stood there, the same living being, but rather less stable, as if I were defying gravity. An experience in the highest degree incredible, yet which I cannot doubt, having no reason to question my sanity. If the whole world united in telling me it was a dream, I would remain unconvinced, even as I may fail to convince my reader of the reality of my experience.

The genuine realist, says Dostoievski, if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact, would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. I have no reason to distrust my senses, and what follows, I think, corroborates the fact.