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Mark Twain’s Dream Excursions

“Waking I move slowly; but in my dreams my unhampered spiritualized body flies to the ends of the earth in a millionth of a second. Seems to - and I believe, does....

    "I do actually make immense excursions in my spiritualized person. I go into awful dangers...I go to unnamable places, I do unprincipled things; and every vision is vivid, every sensation - physical as well as moral - is real.”

- Mark Twain’s Notebook edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. New York: Harper & Bros., 1935, 350-1.

At the time he wrote this, Mark Twain was drafting his Letters to Satan and sketches for other books at Weggis (a Celtic name for The Place of the Ferrymen) on Lake Lucerne, where he began to emerge from the crushing despair that gripped him when the death of his beloved daughter Susy followed financial disaster. He now began to turn his dream life into a vital part of his work - drawing validation from William James's recently published Principles of Psychology.