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the explanation is quite simple. When you’re out of your body, time, as weknow it, ceases to exist, so in a single night you may journey great distances, meet many people and do an extraordinary variety of things. Therefore, when you awake, if you have any memory at all, it is only of the high spots in your night’s adventures.’
    â€˜But they don’t make sense. One thing doesn’t even lead to another.’
    â€˜Of course not. But tell me about your normal waking life. Starting from Monday morning, what have you done this week?’
    â€˜Well, now, let me see. On Monday I had a meeting with Beaverbrook—very interesting. On Tuesday I lunched with the Admiral responsible for arranging our convoy routes—no, that was Wednesday—it was Tuesday I damn’d-near ricked my ankle—slid down the Duke of York’s Steps. That morning, too, I had a letter from my nephew—hadn’t heard from the young devil for months— he’s with the Coldstream, in the Middle East. Wednesday I lost an important paper, got in a hell of a stew; quite unnecessary, as I had it in the lining of my hat-band all the time, but it gave me a devilish bad half-hour. Yesterday I met you and …’
    â€˜That’s quite enough to illustrate my point,’ interrupted the Duke. ‘If those three days had been compressed into a one-night dream you would probably have wakened up with a muddled impression that you were walking in an aircraft factory with Lord Beaverbrook when you suddenly fell and nearly ricked your ankle, to pick yourself up and find that he had disappeared and that you were out with the Admiral on the cold waters of the Atlantic where we are losing so much of our shipping; then that you had the awful impression that you had lost something of the greatest importance, although you couldn’t think what it was, and that you were hunting for it with your soldier-nephew in the sands of Libya, in an interval from chasing the Italians. That is what is called telescoping. None of these things would have had the least apparent connection any more than the events in real life which you gave to me; but it’s quite natural that memory either of real life or of dream activities leaps to the matters which have made great impressions upon the mind. Things of less importance very soon become submerged in the general stream of the subconscious, and I’m willing to bet you a tenner that you could not now recall accurately what you ate at each meal during those three days, however hard you tried. It’s just the same with the memory of a dream, except that by training one can bring oneself to fill in gaps and follow the whole sequence.’
    â€˜Yes; I get your line of argument. But how would this help a German spy to convey information to the enemy?’
    â€˜Once one is able to remember one’s dreams clearly, the next step is to learn how to direct them, since that, too, can be done by practice. One can go to sleep having made up one’s mind that one wishes to meet a certain friend on the astral and be quite certain of doing so. Such a state is not easy of achievement, but it is possible to anybody who has sufficient determination to go through the dreary training without losing heart, and it is no matter of education or secret ritual but simply a case of having enough will-power to force oneself into swift wakefulness each morning and concentrating one’s entire strength of mind upon endeavouring to recall every possible detail about one’s dreams. Once that has been successfully accomplished, one has only to go to sleep thinking of the person whom one wishes to meet on the astral plane, then one wakes in the morning with the full consciousness of having done so. It is a tragic fact that countless couples who have been separated by the war
do
meet each other every night in their spirit bodies, but, through never having trained themselves, by the time they