In his dreams, he had always been Mark Twain; awake, he had always been Samuel Clemens. It had been so since the day he had first used the pseudonym. At first, he thought of it as a warning, but the first dreams had been sweet like the Missouri summers of his childhood, before his father’s death. There was a rare quality to them, and he awoke refreshed and invigorated and filled with the kind of joy that not even the most vivid memory of his childhood years could supply; of course, as time continued, not all the dreams of Mark Twain had been so pleasant, but even the nightmares provided him with a substance that nothing in the waking world could provide him. And now, at sixty, asleep in the White Horse Motel in Sydney, the small, grey haired man no longer felt the slightest sense of warning as he dreamed. It was natural, normal, as familiar as the shape of his hands. It simply was. Mark Twain dreamed: He stood on the wooden, creaking docks of Sydney Harbour.
