relaxing for you."

"But if that is true, why did my dream have to end so unpleasantly—I might say, so nearly fatally?" Bennett demanded.

"The more successful I am in choosing a pleasant existence for a patient in the somno, the more difficult it is to bring him out of it," the doctor replied. "Your unconscious mind, realizing how happy you were in your simulated existence, and how it would have to return to the rigor and stress which unnerved it before, fought with all its strength to remain where the somno had placed it.

"The usual practice in bringing a patient back to reality is for the doctor to enter the dream and convince him, by whatever means may be necessary, to return. Sometimes, however, the patient is so firmly tied to his somno-existence that drastic measures must be used. This is usually done by means of making the somno-existence so anxiety-producing that the patient is glad to return.

"Your particular release was one of the most difficult that I have ever encountered. In fact, I was unable to bring you back myself, and asked your wife, Lima, to enter the somno with me and help force you to return."

Bits of recollection, which had been edging into Bennett's memory, burst through in full force, and he remembered. It was true. He was Benn Ett, Le Roy of the city-state of Thone.

He turned to Lima and, as he read the glad light in her eyes, he knew that she had witnessed the return of his complete memory.

"Welcome home," she said.

—CHARLES V. DE VET

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