Two selves dispute the brocade left in snow

In two successive dreams of rather disordered sleep I was preoccupied by the same absurd but nightmareish worry. I thought that certain household possessions, some fine pieces of brocade, and silk curtains, had been left out of doors, and had been found in the rain and melting snow. The care of getting these things dried and restored became an obsession which distracted my dream imagination. In the second part of the dream, when the trouble had become acute, and when I was presumably near to the point of waking, I not only took part as the dreamer, but was present in a double capacity; for "I" interrupted the dream, and argued sternly with the dreamer as to the reality of the trouble that was so oppressive. "I" said, "This is a dream — I am certain of it; you must wake." But the dreamer replied, "It cannot simply be a dream, because it was not only in this dream, but in the dream before this one that I discovered these things in the snow; it must be real, or it would not happen twice, and here are the actual things which you can see and touch for yourself." "I" was very puzzled, and said that "I" could not answer this, or explain it properly; it did indeed seem very real even to me, and very confusing. "I" examined the soiled materials again ; they felt very wet and dripping in my hands and seemed to be convincingly "real." "Perhaps," I thought, "some of the seeming facts are really true" — I could not disentangle them from what was false; only "I" felt sure that a great deal of the worry was "dream trouble, not day trouble." "No," the dreamer argued again, "for you can see and feel the wet things — they are too real to be 'dream things.'" "Well," "I" said at last, "will you put it to the touch, and test it? Wake," "I" said, "and see just how much of this is a dream!" And I woke.