“A very good dream. Perhaps you are a better dreamer than you think.”

“Are you going to tell me that it means something?”

“All dreams mean something.”

“For Joseph and Pharaoh, or Pilate’s wife, perhaps. You will have to work very hard to convince me that they mean anything here and now.”

“I am sure I shall have to work hard. But just for the moment, tell me without thinking too carefully about it if you recognized any of the people in your dream.”

“Nobody.”

“Do you think they might be people you have not yet seen? Or had not seen yesterday?”

“Doctor von Haller, you are the only person I have seen whom I did not know yesterday.”

“I thought that might be so. Could I have been anybody in your dream?”

“You are going too fast for me. Are you suggesting that I could have dreamed of you before I knew you?”

“That would certainly seem absurd, wouldn’t it? Still—I asked if I could have been anybody in your dream?”

“There was nobody in the dream who could possibly have been you. Unless you are hinting that you were the incomprehensible gypsy. And you won’t get me to swallow that.”

“I am sure nobody could get a very able lawyer like you to swallow anything that was ridiculous, Mr Staunton. But it is odd, don’t you think, that you should dream of meeting a female figure of a sort quite outside your experience, who was trying to tell you something important that you couldn’t understand, and didn’t want to understand, because you were so eager to get back to your enclosed, pleasant surroundings, and your barrister’s robes, and presiding over something?”

“Doctor von Haller, I have no wish to be rude, but I think you are spinning an ingenious interpretation out of nothing. You must know that until I came here today I had no idea that J. von Haller was a woman. So even if I had dreamed of coming to an analyst in this very fanciful way, I couldn’t have got that fact right, could I?”

“It is not a fact, except insofar as all coincidences are facts. You met a woman in your dream, and I am a woman. But not necessarily that woman. I assure you it is nothing uncommon for a new patient to have an important and revealing dream before treatment begins—before he has met his doctor. We always ask, just in case. But an anticipatory dream containing an unknown fact is a rarity. Still, we need not pursue it now. There will be time for that later.”

“Will there be any later? If I understand the dream, I cannot make head or tail of the gypsy woman with the incomprehensible conversation, and go back to my familiar world. What do you deduce from that?”

“Dreams do not foretell the future. They reveal states of mind in which the future may be implicit. Your state of mind at present is very much that of a man who wants no conversation with incomprehensible women. But your state of mind may change. Don’t you think so?”