January 3 Sunday – Sam’s notebook from Jan. 7 about this day:

London — / Last Sunday [Jan.3] I struck upon a new “solution” of a haunting mystery. Great many years ago (20?) I published in the Atlantic “The Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut.”

That was an attempt to account for our seeming duality —the presence in us of another person; not a slave of ours, but free & independent, & with a character distinctly its own.

I made my conscience that other person; & it came before me in the form of a malignant dwarf & told me plain things about myself, and shamed me & scoffed at me & derided me. This creature was so much its own master that it would leave the premises—leave its post—forsake its duties—& go off on sprees with other disreputable consciences—& discuss their masters (no—their slaves)

Presently Stevenson published Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. That was nearer the thing. J & H were the dual persons in one body—quite distinct in nature & character; & presumably each with a conscience of its own. Nearer, yes, but not near enough. Or, to put it differently, a truth & a falsity harnessed together: the falsity being the ability of the one person to step into the other person’s place at will.

I have underscored “conscience of its own.” When I made my Conscience my other person, & independent, with its own (original) character, it was a mistake. My conscience is a part of me. It is a mere machine, like my heart—but moral, not physical; & being moral, is teachable, its action modifiable. It is merely a thing; the creature of training; it is whatever one’s mother & Bible & comrades & laws & system of government & habitat & heredities have made it. It is not a separate person, it has no originality, no independence.

Inborn nature is Character, by itself, in the brutes—the tiger, the dove, the fox, etc; inborn nature and the modifying Conscience, working together, make Character in Man.

Jekyll & Hyde are correct, insofar as each had a separate & distinct nature-&-conscience character.

But the Baltimore & other cases show that the two persons in a man have no command over each other (as falsely pretended in Jekyll & H.; the two persons in a man do not even know each other, are not aware of each other’s existence, never heard of each other, have never even suspected each other’s existence.

And so, I was wrong in the beginning; that other person is not one’s conscience; and Stevenson was wrong, for the two persons in a man are wholly unknown to each other, & can never in this world communicate with each other in any way.

Now I come to my new notion.

The French have lately shown (apparently) that the other person is in command during the somnambulic sleep; that it has a memory of its own & can recal its acts when hypnotised & thrown again into that sleep; but that you have no memory of its acts. You were not present at all.

Very good. That is distinct duality. To this arrangement I wish to add this detail—that we have a spiritualized self which can detach itself & go wandering off upon affairs of its own—for recreation, perhaps. I am not acquainted with my double, my partner in duality, the other & wholly independent personage who resides in me—& whom I will call Watson, for I do not know his name although he most certainly has one, & signs it in a hand which has no resemblance to mine when he takes possession of our partnership body & goes off on mysterious trips—but I am acquainted (dimly) with my spiritualized self; & I know that it & I are one, because we have a common memory: when I wake, mornings, I remember what it (that is, I) have been doing, & whither it (that is, I) have been wandering in the course of what I took to be unrealities, and called Dreams, for want of a truthfuller name.

Now, as I take it, my finer self, my dream self is merely my ordinary body & mind freed from clogging flesh & become a spiritualized body & mind, & with the ordinary powers of both enlarged in all particulars a little, & in some particulars prodigiously.

For instance, to the ordinary vision the vision of the X-ray is added,—the invisible ray—& I am able to use it, & see through opaque bodies. You have an instance of this in the biography of Agassiz. In a dream he saw through the stone that contained a fossil shell, & woke up & drew a picture of that shell; & when he broke open the stone, his picture was correct.

Waking, I move slowly; but in my dreams my unhampered spiritualized body flies to the ends of the earth in the millionth of a second. Seems to—& I believe, does.

Waking, I cannot form in my mind the minutely-detailed & living features of a face & form & a costume which I have never seen, but my dream-self can do all this with the accuracy & vividness of a camera.

Waking, I cannot create in my mind a picture of a room & furniture which I have not recently seen or have never seen; but my dream self can do this, to the minutest detail.

My dream self meets friends, strangers, the dead, the living—all sorts & kinds of dream-people—& holds both rational & irrational conversations with them upon subjects which (often) have not been in my waking mind, & which (in some cases) could never have been in it. And these people say things to me which affect me in all ways: pleasurably, sadly, offensively, humiliatingly. They make me cry, they make me laugh, they make me rage, they make me fight, they make me run, they make me insult the weak, they make me cringe to the strong & swallow the insults of the insolent. And I am always myself, not that other person who is in me— Watson.

I do not actually make immense excursions in my spiritualized person. I go into awful dangers; I am in battles & trying to hide from bullets; I fall over cliffs (& my unspiritualized body starts); I get lost in caves & in the corridors of monstrous hotels; I appear before company in my shirt; I come on the platform with no subject to talk about, & not a note; I go to unnamable places, I do unprintable things; & every vision is vivid, every sensation—physical as well as moral—is real.

When my physical body dies, my dream-body will doubtless continue its excursions & activities without change, forever.

In my dream last night [Jan 6] I was suddenly in the presence of a negro wench who sitting in a grassy open country under a shed, with her left arm resting on the arm of one of those long park-sofas that are made of broad slats with cracks between & a curve-over back. She was very vivid to me—round black face, shiny black eyes, thick lips, very white & regular teeth showing through her smile. She was about 22, & plump—not fleshy, not fat, merely rounded & plump; & good-natured & not at all bad looking. She had but one garment on—a coarse tow-linen shirt that reached from her neck to her ancles without break. She sold me a pie; a mushy apple pie—hot. She was eating one herself, with a tin teaspoon. She made a disgusting proposition to me. Although it was disgusting it did not surprise me—for I was young (I was never old in a dream yet) & it seemed quite natural that it should come from her. It was disgusting, but I did not say so; I merely made a chaffy remark brushing aside the matter—a little jeeringly—& this embarrassed her & she made an awkward pretence that I had misunderstood her. I made a sarcastic remark about this pretence, & asked for a spoon to eat my pie with. She had but the one, & she took it out of her mouth in a quite matter-of-course way & offered it to me. My stomach rose, and—there everything vanished.

It was not a dream—it all happened. I was actually there in person—in my spiritualized condition. My, how vivid it all was!—even to the texture of her shirt, its dull white color, & the pale brown tint of a stain on the shoulder of it. I had never seen that girl before; I was not acquainted with her—but dead or alive she is a reality; she exists, & she was there. Her pie was a spiritualized pie, no doubt, & also her shirt & the bench & the shed—but their actualities were at that moment in existence somewhere in the world.

The time that my dream-self first appeared to me & explained itself, (apparently I was for the moment dreaming) it was as insubstantial as a dim blue smoke, & I saw the furniture through it, but it was dressed in my customary clothes [NB 40 TS 1-7]. Note: see J. Kaplan p. 341-3 for a discussion of this passage and of various influences on Twain.