Speaking before a large audience in the living room of the Harvard Union on the subject. "An Artist and Poet Considers Dreams." George W. Russell, "AE," explained some of his beliefs about the power of dreams.

This noted Irish poet and painter, "a mixture of dreamer and man of facts," to quote Professor F. N. Robinson '91 who introduced the speaker, believes that dreams for the common man as well as for the poet and painter open a new field of vision, a combination of many memories that in waking consciousness could never be produced. To illustrate his point he told of a dream wherein he found himself flying above the rooftops of his native Dublin. As this happened long before the days of airplanes, it gave him an entirely new conception of the houses, and he later painted a picture from this dream perspective.

Russell also recounted an incident to prove the rapidness of dreams, even in the case of those who are normally mentally slow. A wife awoke her husband one morning by drawing her fingernail across his throat. He awoke immediately, but in this few seconds he had dreamed of events covering a period of four hours duration ending with his being placed under a guillotine during the French revolution.

The fact that people who in daily life are poor and unfortunate can still create for themselves in their dreams a "golden heaven" was stressed by AE. He closed his lecture with the idea that "people who in daily life are poor may in their dreams be kings."