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By Root 1856 0

or of a stroke has made us forget, what gradually returns to us as our eyes open or our paralysis disappears. I had lived through so many hours in a few minutes that, wishing to address Françoise, for whom I had rung, in words that corresponded to the facts of real life and were regulated by the clock, I was obliged to exert all my inner power of compression in order not to say: “Well, Françoise, here we are at five o’clock in the evening and I haven’t set eyes on you since yesterday afternoon.” And seeking to dispel my dreams, giving them the lie and lying to myself as well, I said brazenly, compelling myself with all my might to silence, the direct opposite: “Françoise, it must be at least ten o’clock!” I did not even say ten o’clock in the morning, but simply ten o’clock, so that this incredible hour might appear to be uttered in a more natural tone. And yet to say these words, instead of those that continued to run in the mind of the half-awakened sleeper that I still was, demanded the same effort of equilibrium that a man requires when, jumping out of a moving train and running for some yards along the platform, he manages to avoid falling. He runs for a moment because the environment that he has just left was one animated by great velocity, and utterly unlike the inert soil to which his feet find it difficult to accustom themselves.

Because the dream world is not the waking world, it does not follow that the waking world is less real; far from it. In the world of sleep, our perceptions are so overloaded, each of them blanketed by a superimposed counterpart which doubles its bulk and blinds it to no purpose, that we are unable even to distinguish what is happening in the bewilderment of awakening: was it Françoise who had come to me, or I who, tired of calling her, went to her? Silence at that moment was the only way of revealing nothing, as when we are brought before a magistrate cognisant of all the charges against us when we ourselves have not been informed of them. Was it Françoise who had come, or was it I who had summoned her? Was it not, indeed, Françoise who had been asleep and I who had just awoken her? To go further still, was not Françoise contained within me, for the distinction between persons and their interaction barely exists in that murky obscurity in which reality is no more translucent than in the body of a porcupine, and our all but non-existent perception may perhaps give us an idea of the perception of certain animals? Besides, in the state of limpid unreason that precedes these heavy slumbers, if fragments of wisdom float there luminously, if the names of Taine and George Eliot are not unknown, the waking state remains none the less superior to the extent that it is possible to continue it every morning, but not to continue the dream life every night. But perhaps there are other worlds more real than the waking world. Even it we have seen transformed by each new revolution in the arts, and still more, at the same time, by the degree of proficiency or culture that distinguishes an artist from an ignorant fool.

And often an extra hour of sleep is an attack of paralysis after which we must recover the use of our limbs and learn to speak. Our will would not be adequate for this task. We have slept too long, we no longer exist. Our waking is barely felt, mechanically and without consciousness, as a water pipe might feel the turning off of a tap. A life more inanimate than that of the jellyfish follows, in which we could equally well believe that we had been drawn up from the depths of the sea or released from gaol, were we but capable of thinking anything at all. But then from the highest heaven the goddess Mnemotechnia bends down and holds out to us in the formula “the habit of ringing for coffee” the hope of resurrection. Even then, the instantaneous gift of memory is not always so simple. Often we have at our disposal, in those first minutes in which we allow ourselves to glide into the waking state, a variety of different realities among which we imagine that we can choose as from a pack of cards.