“Never mind,” I said comfortingly. “We enjoyed it. I wouldn't have missed that bog−hole for worlds.”
“If there is a bog−hole anywhere within reach you never do miss it,” retorted Piers. “But still, what I should like to know is where you think the story came from. I mean, how did it happen in your mind? I must send it back so that you can read it,” he said to the Hancocks, “if Daphne doesn't mind.”
Daphne hesitated. “Well,” she said frowning a little and scraping the crumbs on the cloth together with her finger, “well, it was a sort of dream, or a lot of dreams. I know that sounds impossible: I mean, one couldn't normally dream all that—all those conversations and so on. It's frightfully difficult to express this, but you yourself must have had a dream something like that at some time. I mean, one where you wake up and although you can only remember clearly one or two incidents, or one or two sentences that someone has said in your dream, yet you have the strongest feeling that there was a tremendous amount more that you just fail to remember, something that's there, and yet just eludes your grasp.”
“The tail of the mouse disappearing down the hole,” I said. “Yes, I've sometimes had that feeling after a dream.”
“Well,” she said, “this was like that, but somehow a much stronger feeling and such a vivid sense of reality that really, while I was writing it down, I did seem to be recollecting actual facts. As soon as I put pen to paper the whole thing came pouring back: I knew that all that talk of Dr Ravelin's that I'd dreamed must have been like that, and I knew I must have seen the park just like that, and that the girls and Nuaman must have done what they did do. I mean, I don't say that I remembered all that talk word for word, but I woke up with sentences perfectly clear in my mind and I knew that if so−and−so had been said then all the other must have led up to it.”
I thought I understood what she was trying to say, and Piers supported her by telling us that once before his Tripos he had woken up in the morning convinced that he had composed a complete series of answers to a paper on Seventeenth Century Drama in his sleep.
The doctor was interested. “When did the dreams begin?” he asked Daphne.
“That's one of the funny things about it,” she said. “I can't quite decide. I know that for a time after you left me in the hall there at Ringstones I didn't think about anything very much except the pain in my ankle and my wrist and how I was to get back; though, at the same time, I was worrying about my watch. It's only a cheap one, but I wish I hadn't lost it. Then I remember feeling cold, which was odd, because the day was close and sultry. I think I did get a bit frightened then. I began to feel that the place was awfully still and lonely, though there were faint little noises rustling about in some of the rooms, and quite suddenly, I remember, I heard some people, children they sounded like, laughing and calling to each other outside. I was absolutely convinced I heard them. I just couldn't catch the words, but they were voices. I wasn't frightened, simply because they were so real. I was thinking more of the shock they were going to get if they came inside and saw me sitting there at the foot of the stairs.”
“The jackdaws,” I suggested. “They can sound very human. They and the noise of the beck. I've once or twice been as convinced myself when we've been camping near a hill stream that someone was talking close by and had to get up to assure myself it was only the water.”
“Yes,” said Daphne doubtfully. “Yes, I suppose that must have been it. But then someone came down the stairs behind me and touched me at the back of the neck and then I fainted.”
“What!” we all shouted together. “Down the stairs? There aren't any stairs!”
Daphne looked really startled. “Aren't there?” she asked incredulously. “But I sat on them. That's where you made me sit down while you bandaged my ankle, isn't it?” She turned to Dr Hancock.
The doctor looked at her very keenly. “You sat on the bottom step,” he said. “But that's all there was to sit on. The rest of the stairs were taken out long ago. Didn't you notice when we went in? Well, no, perhaps you wouldn't. I suppose that ankle was giving you enough pain to distract your mind from your surroundings at that moment. That's rather an interesting example of the power of suggestion. You were sitting on a stair with your back to where the rest of the stairs ought to be, and even though you can perhaps feel that there's nothing behind you, yet your subconscious mind makes the assumption that the rest of the stairs are there. But I should say that in recalling what happened you have involuntarily transposed two events: you fainted first—the fatigue and shock could account for that—and after a partial recovery of consciousness there was this hallucination of hearing footsteps and being touched. There may even have been a slight delirium, though, at the time, the injury didn't seem to me sufficient. But you never know. I once saw a hefty Egyptian fellah pass clean out from a subcutaneous injection.”
“You know,” Daphne resumed, “I really did think that there were stairs there. I can't quite picture that hall without them. I can see now, I think, that all my dreams about the place were pieced together from what you'd told me before, not from what I actually saw there. I don't think I was quite conscious any of the time from that faint I did until waking up the next morning in bed here. At any rate, I have no clear idea at all of being put into the trap and brought back. Perhaps—I don't know—some disjointed land of impression of turning wheels and a whip cracking. But the next morning, although I woke up feeling all right except that my ankle hurt, I was absolutely certain that I had spent the whole time from that faint in one tremendous crowded dream and that, if I tried, I could recollect the whole of it in perfect detail, and, well, that conviction was so strong that I hobbled over to my chest of drawers and got out that new exercise book and my fountain pen and began to scribble it all down.”
She sat back and looked round at us.
“I should like to see this production,” said the doctor. “It's quite a feat to write down a dream, but it isn't by any means impossible. After all, reason and imagination step in to fill in the gaps between the genuinely recollected incidents of the dream. The neo−rosicrucians make a practice of it. I've seen some of their records of dreams. Astonishing farragos.”
I nodded. I bad seen some too. It seems to me,” I said, feeling rather pleased that my simple explanation of the story as an exercise in fiction had after all been a bit nearer the mark than Piers's mystery−mongering; “it seems to me that you had all the elements of the story, or dream, that you wrote already supplied to you here, from Dr Hancock's stories of Dr Ravelin's talks with his father, from the presence of these two little Egyptian girls and the little boy. Most of the matter of Dr Ravelin's archaeological ramblings might be dream reproductions of bits you had read in some of these books here, if you've dipped into them.” (Daphne admitted she had.) “If pain can start you dreaming, and I suppose it might, perhaps underlying feelings of anxiety—I mean about your watch and getting home—might be expressed in a land of crazy story in which physical exertion and being held a prisoner were the main themes...”