Fall of Sleep

Sleep you don’t live.

I lie in bed waiting to be undone, with relief I feel my thoughts becoming hazy, incoherent, my body becoming not heavy but light, rising up, I still experience even the onset of what we call the fall, but not the fall itself.

Sleep is unthinkable. When I think that I’m falling asleep, either I don’t fall anymore or I don’t think anymore. Proust writes that he barely had time to say to himself, I am falling asleep, when the thought that it was time to go to sleep would wake him. But the first thought would already wake me. I think, finally, I am falling, and I am called back.

There is a moment when there is no going back; this moment is to be reached, but not to be seen. Only without yourself may you reach it. You have to take off everything. Only with the shadow of the fire in the inner of your heart may you enter.

Only the sleeping self is alone. Awake, you are alone with yourself.

The limits of life are inside of life. Every night I die into myself, every morning I am born out of myself. But it takes a long time to be born again. It takes longer than a day.

If to sleep is to return to oneself, then not to sleep is to be lost; the umbilical cord, which was Ariadne’s thread, cut.

In the middle of our life, I found myself in bed, lost.

There is life in death and death in life; both are called: dream. To dream is to be awake in your sleep or to be asleep in your wakefulness.

Strange that we don’t all dream one dream, even though, dreaming, you are in a way floating apart from the body that distinguishes you from others. But the body dreams, while the soul, which belongs to no-one, sleeps dreamlessly.

I often dream that I’m unable to do something simple and everyday: move my arm (it is locked), say something (no words come out), keep glasses of water upright (I cannot not knock them over). Especially the dream with the glasses recurs frequently. If I move towards the glasses, which are standing on the table, they start tumbling even before my fingers touch them; if I move away from them, my foot gets caught in the table cloth. Everything conspires to make the satisfaction of a simple desire impossible. I don't think there is ever anything inside the glasses except water. Nonetheless it is extremely frustrating, and the whole scene is permeated by the atmosphere of nightmare.

In another nightmare, I cannot put my clothes on. A murderer is on his way, is almost at the door, and nothing is more unpleasant than to receive a murderer in a state of undress. But my feet get stuck in my trouser legs, my head in the wrong hole of my jumper, as if I grew and these are my childhood clothes. Just before my final demise I think: clothes really don’t have any shape, just like my skin which, once stripped off and crumbled up, will no longer fit around my bones.

The frog is turned back into a prince, the spell lifts, just before he hits the wall.