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[Aetat. 18-20 ] J O Y C E 85will be pleased with me if I do. Now, goodbye for the present . . . O, thebeautiful sunlight in the avenue and O, the sunlight in my heart!It was probably a reminiscence rather than a resurgence of religious feeling,if it was in fact Joyce's own experience. It is transitional to the finishedtype, a secular moment such as he put almost without change atthe end of A Portrait of the Artist; this one is a call to the soul too, butnot a call from Mary:The spell of arms and voices—the white arms of roads, their promiseof close embraces, and the black arms of tall ships that stand against themoon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We arealone—come. And the voices say with them, 'We are your people.' Andthe air is thick with their company as they call to me their kinsman, makingready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.This kind of epiphany, which suggests the secret life of the spirit, connectswith a group of dreams. There was much talk of dreams in Dublinat this time; both Yeats and AE were writing theirs down, and Joyce'ssource of inspiration was probably the poets rather than the psychologists.*The strangest of his dream epiphanies is one that he interpreted tobe about Ibsen:Yes—they are the two sisters. She who is churning with stout arms(their butter is famous) looks dark and unhappy; the other is happy becauseshe had her way. Her name is R . . . Rina. I know the verb 'to be' intheir language.—Are you Rina?—I knew she was.But here he is himself in a coat with tails and an old-fashioned highhat. He ignores them: he walks along with tiny steps, jutting out the tailsof his coat. . . . My goodness! how small he is! He must be very old andvain—maybe he isn't what I. . . . It's funny that two big women fell outover this little man . . . But then he's the greatest man on earth.He neatly contrasts commonplace remarks with a strange, dreamlike indefinitenessof person and place, so that the total effect is peculiar, almostuncanny.The subtlety of these sketches was not lost upon Joyce or upon the fewpeople to whom he showed them. Although the epiphanies were clearlypreparatory, Joyce played for a time with the thought of forming theminto a small book, and it was only later, in 1904, that he saw he couldinsert them instead in Stephen Hero to aid in the exposures and illuminationsof that novel. Well before this rescue, they gave him assuranceof his artistic mission, which he expressed directly in a letter he wrote toIbsen in Dano-Norwegian in March 1901:"Freud's Traumdeutung appeared late in 1899, but Joyce's interest in dreams is pre-Freudian in that it looks for revelation, not scientific explanation.