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 by degrees the component parts of my ego.

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them
by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by
the immobility of our conceptions of them. For it always happened that
when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt
to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me through the
darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to
move, would make an effort to construe the form which its tiredness took
as an orientation of its various members, so as to induce from that where
the wall lay and the furniture stood, to piece together and to give a name
to the house in which it must be living. Its memory, the composite memory
of its ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades offered it a whole series of rooms
in which it had at one time or another slept; while the unseen walls kept
changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it
remembered, whirling madly through the darkness. And even before my brain,
lingering in consideration of when things had happened and of what they
had looked like, had collected sufficient impressions to enable it to