eleven at night
Or some new-seen and yet familiar cluster of houses in a grey village of the upper Thames overtopped by the delicate tracery of a fourteenth-century church ; or even sometimes the very buildings of the past untouched by the degradation of the sordid utilitarianism that cares not and knows not of beauty and history : as once , when I was journeying -LRB- in a dream of the night -RRB- down the well-remembered reaches of the Thames betwixt Streatley and Wallingford , where the foothills of the White Horse fall back from the broad stream , I came upon a clear-seen mediaeval town standing up with roof and tower and spire within its walls , grey and ancient , but untouched from the days of its builders of old . All this I have seen in the dreams of the night clearer than I can force myself to see them in dreams of the day . So that it would have been nothing new to me the other night to fall into an architectural dream if that were all , and yet I have to tell of things strange and new that befell me after I had fallen asleep . I had begun my sojourn in the Land of Nod by a very confused attempt to conclude that it was all right for me to have an engagement to lecture at Manchester and Mitcham Fair Green at half-past eleven at night on one and the same Sunday , and that I could manage pretty well . And then I had gone on to try to make the best of addressing a large open-air audience in the costume I was really then wearing -- to wit , my night-shirt , reinforced for the dream occasion by a pair of braceless trousers . The consciousness of this fact so bothered me , that the earnest faces of my audience -- who would NOT notice it , but were clearly preparing terrible anti-Socialist posers for me -- began to fade away and my dream grew thin , and I awoke -LRB- as I thought -RRB- to find myself lying on a strip of wayside waste by an oak copse just outside a country village . I got up and rubbed my eyes and looked about me , and the landscape seemed unfamiliar to me , though it was , as to the lie of the land , an ordinary English low-country , swelling into rising ground here and there .