TIDE-LINE

(January 1941)

Now he takes my temperature, puts his hand on my wrist.
"The trouble," he says, "is not a temperature but an under-
temperature." I have probably been feeding my blue-brain
(that part of my mind that does my living for me), too much
energy. But he doesn't detract from the reality of that world,
with his words. I am in both dimensions at the same time.
(My desk-lamp is flickering and now I try the other lights and
about
they all pulse and beat as if/to go out at any minute; some
power-house in trouble.)

....

So the 4th dimensional world, the world of dream, of
vision, of the blue-light, as I call it, high-powered thought,
and the ordinary world come together. If I call the ordinary
world, and its mental equivalent, the yellow light of the torch,
then I suppose the intermediate world, the blue and the yellow
together, should be green. It is perhaps the green world of
rest, grass, trees, the level surface of the sea between tides.
The full tide perhaps is the wash-up of externals; when the
tide recedes, it leaves hidden beings and plants on that rela-
tively infinitesimal strip of wet sand, that is ground common to

2.

both sea and land. When the tide of ordinary thought recedes,
it can show these strange creatures, a phosphorescent jelly-fish,
a star-fish, some trail of rare plant torn from a tropic sea-bed,
a pebble of cornelian, coral-branch or amber. Those unusual trea-
sures are the findings of the 4th dimensional mind, the inspira-
tional mind or dream mind, but while we live in this world, we can
not sustain that way of thinking, that way of vision for long.
The tide of ordinary thought and living returns, covers the trail
of exotic weed, erases the lovely print of shell, lifts the stranded
jelly-fish back to its element. The high-powered image can not be
sustained. It is drawn slowly back to the deep sea of universal
thought. We must sadly watch it go, or more sadly watch it die,
stranded above the tide-line.