Historical dream account · English · original text
The Six-Horse Equation
James Sully (1842–1923)
Illusions: A Psychological Study (1887) · Printed page(s) 181; Third edition, London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1887; original English; account 397
Dreamer identified by the source: James Sully
Read in your language or share a constellation ↗
In my second dream I was at Cambridge, among a lot of undergraduates. I saw a coach drive up with six horses. Three undergraduates got out of the coach. I asked them why they had so many horses, and they said, "Because of the luggage." I then said, "The luggage is much more than the undergraduates. Can you tell me how to express this in mathematical symbols? This is the way: if x is the weight of an undergraduate, then x + xⁿ represents the weight of an undergraduate and his luggage together." I noticed that this sally was received with evident enjoyment.
Source & context
An original-language historical author's own sleep-dream account, not a new community submission or an independently verified waking event. Editorial title is a navigation label.
James Sully, Illusions: A Psychological Study (1887), Third edition, London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1887; original English, printed page(s) 181.
Publication year is not an exact dream date. No unprinted date, modern contributor location or dreamer age is inferred.
Public domain — original English text ↗
Original author’s 1887 third-edition English prose, not a modern translation; the work was first published in 1881. The source author died in 1923, over 100 years before 2026, and publication precedes 1931. Project Gutenberg supplies the public-domain transcription. Ordinary publication and author-life terms have elapsed, including the longer 80- and 100-year terms relevant to the earlier Foucault hold. This is a historical public-domain assessment, not a blanket license for everything on Archive.org or an all-jurisdiction warranty.
Source locator and text provenance
Printed page(s) 181; Third edition, London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1887; original English; account 397
The original text and redactions are preserved. The page title is an editorial navigation label.
One complete bounded own-dream scene. Adjacent theory excluded; original English preserved. Page furniture omitted, spacing normalized and the exact small formatting/OCR repairs documented in the frozen replay ledger. Editorial navigation title and themes added.
Pinned Gutenberg HTML paragraph text; page furniture and footnote links omitted, whitespace collapsed. Explicit HTML superscript n is retained as Unicode superscript, with that formatting normalization recorded separately. The source is a transcription; no page-image check is claimed.
- Account text SHA-256
- 788deaef4ec77a71fe2457a605e455cae2e7de1c151e64f26fa594e920c8cb9c
- Source file SHA-256
- fe7b84250c042fd96343ce743a5f97445c1c11fe7c1eb5102683de3100872f67
Connections in the Loom
Titles, theme labels, illustrations and map connections are editorial navigation aids. They are separate from the account’s words and do not establish connections between real people.