Historical dream account · English · original text

The miniature engines

Havelock Ellis

The World of Dreams (1922) · Printed page 83; normalized HTML paragraph block 158

I dreamed that I was back in a schoolroom of my boyhood, with two or three of the present masters. The room had been entirely changed, and it contained much new school apparatus and, notably, on a table, several miniature engines, of different character, actually working. I said to the masters that I wished all these apparatus had been there twenty years ago (a considerable under-estimate of the actual interval since I left that schoolroom), so that I might have enjoyed the benefit of them. 'All life is made up of machinery,' I found myself uttering aloud as I awoke, 'and unless you understand machinery you can't understand life.'

Source & context

A historical dream account recorded in Havelock Ellis’s The World of Dreams, using its 1922 edition (first published 1911). The source distinguishes Ellis’s own dreams from separately identified or unnamed contributors. This is not a Synastry community submission.

Havelock Ellis, The World of Dreams (Constable & Company, 1922; first published 1911), p. 83. Public-domain historical dream account, Project Gutenberg transcription.

Individual dream date not specified; exact excerpt from 1922 edition of work first published in 1911.

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Printed page 83; normalized HTML paragraph block 158

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