• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1595 0

his entering the waking state, the sleeper hears a voice inside him saying: “Will you come to this dinner tonight, my dear friend, it would be so nice?” and thinks: “Yes, how nice it would be, I shall go”; then, growing wider awake, he suddenly remembers: “My grandmother has only a few weeks to live, so the doctor assures us.” He rings, he weeps at the thought that it will not be, as in the past, his grandmother, his dying grandmother, but an indifferent valet that will come in answer to his summons. Moreover, when sleep bore him so far away from the world inhabited by memory and thought, through an ether in which he was alone, more than alone, without even the companionship of self-perception, he was outside the range of time and its measurements. But now the valet is in the room, and he dares not ask him the time, for he does not know whether he has slept, for how many hours he has slept (he wonders whether it should not be how many days, with such a weary body, such a rested mind, such a homesick heart has he returned, as from a journey too distant not to have taken a long time).

One can of course maintain that there is but one time, for the futile reason that it is by looking at the clock that one established as being merely a quarter of an hour what one had supposed a day. But at the moment of establishing this, one is precisely a man awake, immersed in the time of waking men, having deserted the other time. Perhaps indeed more than another time: another life. We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence. To take only the most grossly sensual of them all, which of us, on waking, has not felt a certain irritation at having experienced in his sleep a pleasure which, if he is anxious not to tire himself, he is not, once he is awake, at liberty to repeat indefinitely during that day. It seems a positive waste. We have had pleasure in another life which is not ours. If we enter up in a budget the pains and pleasures of dreams (which generally vanish soon enough after our waking), it is not in the current account of our everyday life.

Two times, I have said; perhaps there is only one after all, not that the time of the waking man has any validity for the sleeper, but perhaps because the other life, the life in which he sleeps, is not—in its profounder aspect—included in the category of time. I came to this conclusion when, after those dinner-parties at La Raspelière, I used to sleep so thoroughly. For this reason: I was beginning to despair, on waking, when I found that, after I had rung the bell ten times, the valet did not appear. At the eleventh ring he came. It was only the first after all. The other ten had been mere adumbrations, in my sleep which still hung about me, of the ring that I had been meaning to give. My numbed hands had never even moved. Now, on those mornings (and it is this that makes me think that sleep is perhaps independent of the law of time) my effort to wake up consisted chiefly in an effort to bring the obscure, undefined mass of the sleep in which I had just been living into the framework of time. It is no easy task; sleep, which does not know whether we have slept for two hours or two days, cannot provide us with any point of reference. And if we do not find one outside, not being able to re-enter time, we fall asleep again, for five minutes which seem to us three hours.

I have always said—and have proved by experience—that the most powerful soporific is sleep itself. After having slept profoundly for two hours, having fought with so many giants, and formed so many lifelong friendships, it is far more difficult to awake than after taking several grammes of veronal. And so, reasoning from one thing to the other, I was surprised to hear from the Norwegian philosopher, who had it from M. Boutroux, “my eminent colleague—pardon me, confrère,” what M. Bergson thought of the peculiar effects upon the memory of soporific drugs. “Naturally,” M. Bergson had said to M. Boutroux, according to the Norwegian philosopher,