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"My Platonic Sweetheart" is a short dream narrative written by American writer Mark Twain. It was originally titled "The Lost Sweetheart" and written during Jul–Aug 1898, but only published in late 1912.〔Howard G. Baetzhold, "Found: Mark Twain's "Lost Sweetheart"," ''American Literature'', accessed November 13, 2014, http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2924151?uid=3739256&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21105193243143.〕 The main character (believed to represent Twain) has several dreams throughout his life about the same woman.〔Dale W. Simpson, "Mark Twain and Artistic Inspiration in "My Platonic Sweetheart"," ''Mark Twain Journal'', accessed November 13, 2014, http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/41641230?uid=3739256&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21105192820733.〕 The narrative depicts five of these dreams, and in each dream the main character and the woman take on different names. The woman's appearance (hair and eye color) also changes in each dream. However, the characters' ages in the dreams remain the same, he is seventeen and she is fifteen, and the two characters never fail to recognize each other. ==Summary== In the first dream, the main character's name is George and the woman's name is Alice. The dream takes place in a Missourian village. Alice has blonde hair and blue eyes. George describes their affection as being like "a natural process." They stroll along a country road after exiting a village, and enter an empty log house. Alice soon vanishes after passing through a door, and George follows suit only to find himself standing amidst a cemetery. The log house vanishes and darkness ensues. The main character abruptly awakens, realizes he's in Philadelphia and is actually nineteen years old. In the second dream, the main character's name is Jack and the woman's name is Helen. Jack meets Helen in a forest near Mississippi. Helen has black hair and dark brown eyes. Jack carries Helen over a shallow stream and continues to carry her for miles on end, because he is "without some sense of fatigue or need of rest." They arrive at a plantation house, Helen's home, and Jack meets Helen's parents. Helen falls asleep and everything becomes pitch black. Then, Jack finds himself standing on a frozen lake. The main character wakes up in grief and is sitting at his workplace, a newspaper office in San Francisco. He is twenty nine years old and has been asleep for less than two minutes. In the third dream, the main character's name is Robert and the woman's name is Agnes. The dream takes place in San Francisco and in Iao Valley in the Hawaiian Islands. The main character describes how a "dream-language" exists that "shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries." For example, "'Rax oha tal'" translates to "'When you receive this it will remind you that I long to see your face and touch your hand, for the comfort of it and the peace.'" Agnes passes away in Robert's arms as she is hit by an arrow. The dream ends and the main character is crossing Bond Street in New York with a friend as snow is falling. In the fourth dream, the main character refers to the woman as Agnes again, but he is unnamed. They chat in a large house in Athens as Socrates passes by. Suddenly, the main character awakens and finds himself in his New York home. In the fifth dream, the main character and the woman are unnamed. The dream takes place in India and Windsor Castle, England. By the end of their conversation they conclude that "England is the most beautiful of all the countries...because it is so marginal." Once again, the woman disappears. The main character wakes up from his dream and is going on sixty three years old. The main character concludes that dreams are "deep and strong and sharp and real" while reality is a "vague and dull-tinted artificial world." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「My Platonic Sweetheart」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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