A little learning
‘To sleep, perchance to dream – that is the question.’ Little I dreamed, last year, to publish my memoirs, this; but life’s like that, overnight wringing the changes from yesterday’s expectations to reality of tomorrow. Besides: dreamed, or dreamt? Dreamt exists, but is it right? It’s such a funny word; there’s a sort of ghostly ‘p’ there (the opposite of a silent ‘p’ as in pterodactyl): ‘dreampt’, one can’t help saying, and almost beholds it hovering before one’s eyes, like Hamlet’s sceptre before the troubled Banquet. Spectre, I mean; witness what happened there? One of those Froudian spills, an elf in the brain! Dr Johnson knew all about it with his ‘queer old dean’ and such. Anyhow, I hope readers of these my three volumes (memoir sensu stricture, sundry sequelae, and commentary) will keep them beneath their pillows as companions for those hours betwixt sleeping and waking… ‘perchance to dream’ thereon.
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