The other dream: a snowy plain, smooth like a sheet of paper; no hillock, no tree, no bush anywhere, only--barely visible--a few rods poked out from under the snow. And across the snow of this dead desert from horizon to horizon there stretched a yellow strip of a hardly distinguishable road, and over the road there marched slowly a pair of grey felt top boots--empty.
He raised his shaggy, were-wolf eyebrows, looked at me intently and thought for a while.
"That's terrible. Did you really dream that, you didn't invent it? But there's something bookish in it also."
And suddenly he got angry, and said, irritably, sternly, rapping his knee with his finger: "But you're not a drinking man? It's unlikely that you ever drank much. And yet there's something drunken in these dreams. There was a German writer, Hoffmann, who dreamt that card tables ran about the street, and all that sort of thing, but then he was a drunkard--a 'calaholic,' as our literate coachmen say. Empty boots marching--that's really terrible. Even if you did invent it, it's good. Terrible."
Suddenly he gave a broad smile, so that even his cheek bones beamed.
"And imagine this: suddenly, in the Tverskaya street, there runs a card table with its curved legs, its boards clap, clap, raising a chalky dust, and you can even still see the numbers on the green cloth--excise clerks playing whist on it for three days and nights on end--the table could not bear it any longer and ran away."
He laughed, and then, probably noticing that I was a little hurt by his distrust of me:
"Are you hurt because I thought your dreams bookish? Don't be annoyed; sometimes, I know, one invents something without being aware of it, something which one cannot believe, which can't possibly be believed, and then one imagines that one dreamt it and did not invent it at all. There was a story which an old landowner told. He dreamt that he was walking in a wood and came out of it on to a steppe. On the steppe he saw two hills, which suddenly turned into a woman's breasts, and between them rose up a black face which, instead of eyes, had two moons like white spots. The old man dreamt that he was standing between the woman's legs, in front of him a deep, dark ravine, which sucked him in. After the dream his hair began to grow grey and his hands to tremble, and he went abroad to Doctor Kneip to take a water cure. But, really, he must have seen something of the kind--he was a dissolute fellow."