of so-called solids? His own dreams, you may remember, were so 'real' that he was ever at a loss to know which world was the more vital, the waking world or the world of dreams.
"Once, in Vienna, I was fortunate enough to meet and talk at some length with Schrach about some of his 'experiences' in those subconscious realms of his mind which he termed 'the dreamlands.' For it seemed to Schrach that those brief periods of our steeping lives which the great majority of people term 'dreams' were not dreams at all as he understood the term but merely reflections of the waking world impinging on the surface of the subconscious mind during its shallower sleep-times. To discover the real dreamlands, Schrach said, one must go much deeper.
"For Gerhard Schrach's dreaming took the form of a separate and solid existence which he believed lies at the roots of Man's subconscious. Not merely his own subconscious, you understand, but Man's. He believed that if only we knew how, then all of us might explore those selfsame worlds of wonder! But even so, it would be an exceptionally rare dreamer indeed who could bring back even a fragmentary recollection to the waking world.
"As I have said, he was just such a man, and I was so impressed with the depth and detail of what he told me he had dreamed that I found myself actually carried along by his recounting of his adventures in those dreamlands; by tales and descriptions of dreamland's customs, peoples, rivers and hills and cities.
"Yes, it actually seemed to me as I listened to Schrach that I, too, had known such rivers as the Skai and the Tross, such cities as Ulthar, Celephais and Ilek-Vad ..."
Ulthar, Celephais and Ilek-Vad!
Hero jerked upright in his seat and his hair felt full of some weird energy, an electrical pricking which crawled across his scalp and down his neck to solicit a response from his suddenly charged skin, covering him in shuddery goose-pimples. Ulthar, Celephais and Ilek-Vad!
What in the name of everything holy .. . ?
This man on the stage in the haze of his spotlight-this familiar stranger Hero could not possibly but did somehow recognize-was talking of the subconscious world of another man's dreaming imagination; and yet David Hero, too, had somewhere known those fabled names and places before. Why, when his own imagination was working at its strongest, he even painted them!
Hero heard no more but stumbled to his feet. He was utterly shaken, numb, as he made his way to the foyer, and from there to the wings of die stage, where he waited in a sort of euphoric stupor for Dingle to finish his monologue. He heard little of what remained of the professor's talk, however, for his head was humming with winds of mystery, his mind's eye full of half-seen visions that could not quite be brought into perspective. He stood, he knew, on the tiireshold of something quite momentous, something unique.
And always he kept asking himself: how could this be? Had he heard a-right? Did he and Gerhard Schrach-yes, and perhaps Leonard Dingle, too-share in part a mutual dream-world which, upon awakening, rney left behind except for the occasional tantalizing glimpse or vision? Or had Schrach perhaps written of the lands of his dreaming; and then without knowing it, had Hero somewhere long ago read his work and remembered it, so mat the names of certain dream-places and something of their descriptions had stuck in his head?
There was that possibility, of course, but Hero did not believe that was the answer. For even now, as he impatiently waited for the professor to finish, misted visions of incredible lands beyond the boundaries of the conscious world kept flashing across his mind, half-glimpsed and transient, and yet real, he knew ...
At last it was over and the lights went up on a hall containing less than half of its original number. The roughnecks had departed to face whichever fate pursued or waited for them; the foreign tourists had long since discovered their error and taken their leave of the place; and at last the small core of the audience got wearily to its feet and made to pass out into the city, where by now the twilight of evening would be silently settling.
Hero met Dingle in the wings with: "Sir, my name is David Hero, and-"
"Hero, d'you say?" Dingle rumbled, tucking his crammed briefcase under one great arm. He looked at Hero closely and his forehead wrinkled