The Substance of a Dream

The Substance of a Dream , by F.
W. Bain

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Title: The Substance of a Dream
Author: F. W. Bain

Release Date: March 29, 2007 [eBook #20935]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE SUBSTANCE OF A DREAM
Translated from the Original Manuscript
by
F. W. BAIN

Mix, with sunset's fleeting glow, Kiss of friend, and stab of foe, Ooze of
moon, and foam of brine, Noose of Thug, and creeper's twine, Hottest
flame, and coldest ash, Priceless gems, and poorest trash; Throw away
the solid part, And behold--a woman's heart.
NIDRÁDARPANA

Methuen & Co. Ltd. 36 Essex Street W.C. London Second Edition First
Published . October 16th 1919 Second Edition ... 1919

DEDICATED
to
THE INEXPRESSIBLY GENTLE GENIUS
of
MY OWN MOTHER

INTRODUCTION
I could almost persuade myself, that others will like this little fable as
much as I do: so curiously simple, and yet so strangely profound is its
delicate epitome of the old old story, the course of true love, which

never did run smooth.
And since so many people have asked me questions as to the origin of
these stories, I will say a word on the point here. Where do they come
from? I do not know. I discovered only the other day that some believe
them to have been written by a woman. That appears to me to be
improbable. But who writes them? I cannot tell. They come to me, one
by one, suddenly, like a flash of lightning, all together: I see them in
the air before me, like a little Bayeux tapestry, complete, from end to
end, and write them down, hardly lifting the pen from the paper,
straight off "from the MS." I never know, the day before, when one is
coming: it arrives, as if shot out of a pistol. Who can tell? They may be
all but so many reminiscences of a former birth.
The Substance of a Dream is half a love-story, and half a fairy tale: as
indeed every love-story is a fairy tale. Because, although that
unaccountable mystery, the mutual attraction of the sexes, is the very
essence of life, and everything else merely accidental or accessory, yet
only too often in the jostle of the world, in the trough and tossing of the
waves of time, the accidental smothers the essential, and life turns into
a commonplace instead of a romance. And so, like every other story,
this little story will perhaps be very differently judged, according to the
reader's sex. The bearded critic will see it with eyes very different from
those with which it may be viewed by the fair voter with no beard upon
her chin; for women, as the great god says at the end, have scant mercy
on their own sex, and the heroine of the story is a strange heroine, an
enigmatical Mona Lisa, so to say, who will not appeal to everybody so
strongly as she does to the Moony-crested Deity, when he sums her up
at the close. I venture, with humility, to concur in the opinion of the
Deity, for she holds me under the same spell as her innumerable other
lovers. The reader, a more formidable authority even than the god, must
decide: only I must warn him that to understand, he must go to the very
end. He will not think his time wasted, if he take half the delight in
reading, as I did, in transcribing, the evidence in the case. Only,
moreover, when he closes the book will he appreciate the mingled
exactitude and beauty of its name: for no story ever had a name which
fitted it with such curious precision as this one. For the essence of a

dream is always that along with its weird beauty, it counters
expectation, often in such queer, ludicrous, kaleidoscopic ways. So it is,
here.
* * * * *
Many bitter things, since the beginning, have men said of women,
though neither so many nor so bitter, as the witty Frenchman cynically
remarks, as the things women have said of one another. Poor Eve has
paid very dear for that apple: the only wonder is, that she was not made
responsible also for the Flood: but we have not got the whole