Swanns Way | Page 2

gone to bed, and he must lie all night in
agony with no one to bring him any help.
I would fall asleep, and often I would be awake again for short snatches
only, just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot, or
to open my eyes to settle the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness, to
savour, in an instantaneous flash of perception, the sleep which lay
heavy upon the furniture, the room, the whole surroundings of which I
formed but an insignificant part and whose unconsciousness I should
very soon return to share. Or, perhaps, while I was asleep I had
returned without the least effort to an earlier stage in my life, now for
ever outgrown; and had come under the thrall of one of my childish
terrors, such as that old terror of my great-uncle's pulling my curls,
which was effectually dispelled on the day--the dawn of a new era to
me--on which they were finally cropped from my head. I had forgotten
that event during my sleep; I remembered it again immediately I had
succeeded in making myself wake up to escape my great-uncle's fingers;
still, as a measure of precaution, I would bury the whole of my head in
the pillow before returning to the world of dreams.
Sometimes, too, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a
woman would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived
from some strain in the position of my limbs. Formed by the appetite
that I was on the point of gratifying, she it was, I imagined, who
offered me that gratification. My body, conscious that its own warmth
was permeating hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would
awake. The rest of humanity seemed very remote in comparison with
this woman whose company I had left but a moment ago: my cheek
was still warm with her kiss, my body bent beneath the weight of hers.
If, as would sometimes happen, she had the appearance of some woman
whom I had known in waking hours, I would abandon myself

altogether to the sole quest of her, like people who set out on a journey
to see with their own eyes some city that they have always longed to
visit, and imagine that they can taste in reality what has charmed their
fancy. And then, gradually, the memory of her would dissolve and
vanish, until I had forgotten the maiden of my dream.
When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the
hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host.
Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads
off his own position on the earth's surface and the amount of time that
has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to
grow confused, and to break its ranks. Suppose that, towards morning,
after a night of insomnia, sleep descends upon him while he is reading,
in quite a different position from that in which he normally goes to
sleep, he has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back in its
course, and, at the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the time,
but will conclude that he has just gone to bed. Or suppose that he gets
drowsy in some even more abnormal position; sitting in an armchair,
say, after dinner: then the world will fall topsy-turvy from its orbit, the
magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space, and
when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep
months earlier and in some far distant country. But for me it was
enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to
relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I
had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I
was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most
rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the
depths of an animal's consciousness; I was more destitute of human
qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the
place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and
might now very possibly be, would come like a rope let down from
heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could
never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse and surmount
centuries of civilisation, and out of a half-visualised succession of
oil-lamps, followed by shirts with turned-down collars, would put
together