shock.

Picture to yourself a sleeping man who is being murdered, who
wakes up with a knife in his chest, a gurgling in his throat, is
covered with blood, can no longer breathe, is going to die and
does not understand anything at all about it--there you have it.

Having recovered my senses, I was thirsty again, so I lighted a
candle and went to the table on which my water-bottle was. I
lifted it up and tilted it over my glass, but nothing came out.
It was empty! It was completely empty! At first I could not
understand it at all; then suddenly I was seized by such a
terrible feeling that I had to sit down, or rather fall into a
chair! Then I sprang up with a bound to look about me; then I sat
down again, overcome by astonishment and fear, in front of the
transparent crystal bottle! I looked at it with fixed eyes,
trying to solve the puzzle, and my hands trembled! Some body had
drunk the water, but who? I? I without any doubt. It could surely
only be I? In that case I was a somnambulist--was living, without
knowing it, that double, mysterious life which makes us doubt
whether there are not two beings in us--whether a strange,
unknowable, and invisible being does not, during our moments of
mental and physical torpor, animate the inert body, forcing it to
a more willing obedience than it yields to ourselves.

Oh! Who will understand my horrible agony? Who will understand
the emotion of a man sound in mind, wide-awake, full of sense,
who looks in horror at the disappearance of a little water while
he was asleep, through the glass of a water-bottle! And I
remained sitting until it was daylight, without venturing to go