The Daydreamer

About this time he developed, quite unconscious of his own wish or intension, a faculty that he kept all his life. When he lay in bed with his eyes closed - not in the least degree near sleep - he began to see pictures. A long, a varied procession of blurry pictures passed before his inward eyes, scenes, places he had never beheld with his bodily vision.

These pictures slid smoothly past, one after the other, in full detail, and in bright forgotten colors, brighter and more unusual indeed than the colors of real life, as a landscape seen with eyes closed makes the actual one look dimmed when the eyes are opened.

But he did not always see these pictures. Sometimes he closed his eyes night after night for weeks and he saw nothing, sometimes for several nights running they would come to him. He loved those pictures and wished for them, but wishing did not bring them. Some of them returned quite frequently, others he saw once and no more.

But there was one picture which came again and again to him throughout his short life - a long road into a cavernous forest, deep inside was a high stone wall guarding an unseen garden (he knew it was a garden, though he could not see over the wall) , in the middle of the garden was two large brass doors, one was magnificently glowing and decorated with detailed carvings of angels, the other was choked up with dusty nettles and weeds. He had, from the first time seeing the twin doors, a deep and strange conviction that one day he would go through one of the doors, and that when he did so something very important would happen to him...