I chose to wander by Bethlehem Hospital; partly, because it lay
on my road round to Westminster; partly, because I had a fancy
in my head which could be best pursued within sight of its
walls. And the fancy was: Are not the sane and the insane
5 equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming? Are not all of us
outside this hospital, who dream, more or less in the
condition of those inside it, every night of our lives? Are
we not nightly persuaded, as they daily are, that we associate
preposterously with kings and queens, and notabilities of all
10 sorts? Do we not nightly jumble events and personages and times
and places, as these do daily? Said an afflicted man to me,
when I visited a hospital like this, ‘Sir, I can frequently
fly.’ I was half ashamed to reflect that so could I - by night.
I wonder that the great master, when he called Sleep the death
15 of each day’s life, did not call Dreams the insanity of each
day’s sanity.