Before You Begin

Before you begin.

After losing his way during a hunt, Percy Fairbank reaches a lonely inn and discovers Francis Raven asleep in the yard. Francis wakes in terror and insists that an ordinary dream has pursued him across years, countries and relationships. What begins as one man's fearful recollection gradually becomes a chain of testimony involving his mother, his wife Alicia, a surgeon and the household at Maison Rouge.

Wilkie Collins constructs The Dream Woman as a mystery of memory and evidence. Dates, playing cards, a face at a window, a buckhorn-handled knife and the repeated hour of two in the morning acquire meaning because different witnesses remember them. The story asks whether a warning can save someone who understands it only after events have begun to repeat themselves.

This illustrated edition contains:

- The Dream Woman

Twenty-two progression plates unlock at stable passages in the text. Each is an illustrated map of the people, places, objects and discoveries already encountered; none reveals events beyond the point you have reached. Narrative scenes obey the same semantic locks.