To the imagination of the world we do not pray. We call to mind how, when last we did so, we were asked back, quick as lightning, where we had been when the morning stars sang together, or whether we could bind the sweet influences of Pleiades. Without our having asked them for freedom, these free forces have set us free as mountain winds, have liberated us from initiative and determination, as from responsibility. They deal out no wages, each of their boons to us is a gift, baksheesh, and their highest gift is inspiration. A gift may be named after both the giver and the receiver, and in this way my inspiration is my own, more even than anything else I possess, and is still the gift of God.

The ship has given up tacking and has allied herself to the wind and the current; now her sails fill and she runs on, proudly, upon obliging waves. Is her speed her own achievement and merit or the work and merit of outside powers? We cannot tell. The dancer in the waltz gives herself into the hands of her skilled partner; is the flight and wonder of the dance, now, her own achievement or his? Neither the ship nor the dancer, nor the dreamer, will be able to answer or will care to answer. But they will, all three, have experienced the supreme triumph of Unconditional Surrender.

One last word about dreams:

Some people tell me that the capacity of dreaming belongs to childhood and early youth, and that as your faculties of seeing and hearing ebb away your talent for dreaming will go with them. My own experience tells me that it is the other way. I dream today more than I ever did as a child or a young girl, and in my present dreams things stand out more clearly than ever, and more to be wondered at.

At times I believe that my feet have been set upon a road which I shall go on following, and that slowly the centre of gravity of my being will shift over from the world of day, from the domain of organizing and regulating universal powers, into the world of Imagination. Already now I feel, as when at the age of twenty I was going to a ball in the evening, that day is a space of time without meaning, and that it is with the coming of dusk, with the lighting of the first star and the first candle, that things will become what they really are, and will come forth to meet me.

The unruly river, which has bounced along wildly, sung out loudly and raged against her banks, will widen and calm down, will in the end fall silently into the ocean of dreams, and silently experience the supreme triumph of Unconditional Surrender.

During my first months after my return to Denmark from Africa, I had great trouble in seeing anything at all as reality.