Beyond the majority of mankind

I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever paused to reflect upon the occasionally titanic

significance of dreams and of the obscure world to which they belong. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps

no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences, Freud to the contrary with his purerial symbolism, there

are still a certain reminder whose mundane and ethereal character permit of no ordinary interpretation,

and whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence

no less important than physical life, yet separated from that life by an all but impassable barrier.

From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness is indeed so joining in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger

after waking.

From those blurred and fragmentary memories, we may infer much, yet prove little.

We may guess that in dreams, life, matter, and vitality as the earth knows such things are not necessarily constant,

and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them.

Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life,

and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself, the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.

It was from a youthful revelry filled with speculations of this sort that I arose one afternoon in the

winter of 1900 to 01, when to the state psychopathic institution in which I served as an intern was brought the man whose case has ever since haunted me so unceasingly.

His name, given on the records, was Joe Slater, or Slater, and his appearance was that of the typical

denizen of the Catskill mountain region, one of the strange repellent scions of a primitive colonial

peasant stock, whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the hillside fastnesses of a little

travelled countryside, has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric

degeneracy rather than advance with their more fortunately placed brethren of the thickly settled district. Among these odd folks who

correspond exactly to the decadent element of white trash in the South, law and morals are non-existent, and their general

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