Sometimes at midnight, after having toiled for hours at my occupations, I would fling myself back on my chair, look about the poor apartment, dimly lighted by an unsnuffed candle, or upon the heaps of books and papers before me, and exclaim,--'Do I exist?
Do these things, which I think I see about me, exist, or do they not?
Is not everything a dream--a deceitful dream?
Is not this apartment a dream--the furniture a dream?
The publisher a dream--his philosophy a dream?
Am I not myself a dream--dreaming about translating a dream?
I can't see why all should not be a dream; what's the use of the reality ?' And then I would pinch myself, and snuff the burdened smoky light.

'I can't see, for the life of me, the use of all this; therefore why should I think that it exists?
If there was a chance, a probability, of all this tending to anything, I might believe; but--' and then I would stare and think, and after some time shake my head and return again to my occupations for an hour or two; and then I would perhaps shake, and shiver, and yawn, and look wistfully in the direction of my sleeping apartment; and then, but not wistfully, at the papers and books before me; and sometimes I would return to my papers and books; but oftener I would arise, and, after another yawn and shiver, take my light, and proceed to my sleeping chamber.
They say that light fare begets light dreams; my fare at that time was light enough; but I had anything but light dreams, for at that period I had all kind of strange and extravagant dreams, and amongst other things I dreamt that the whole world had taken to dog-fighting; and that I, myself, had taken to dog-fighting, and that in a vast circus I backed an English bulldog against the bloodhound of the Pope of Rome..