. You choose, and
with extreme precision and delicacy, among your memories, since you
reject all that do not exactly suit your present state. This choice
which you continually accomplish, this adaptation, ceaselessly renewed,
is the first and most essential condition of what is called common
sense. But all this keeps you in a state of uninterrupted tension. You
do not feel it at the moment, any more than you feel the pressure of the
atmosphere, but it fatigues you in the long run. Common sense is very
fatiguing.

"So, I repeat, I differ from you precisely in that I do nothing. The
effort that you give without cessation I simply abstain from giving. In
place of attaching myself to life, I detach myself from it. Everything
has become indifferent to me. I have become disinterested in everything.
To sleep is to become disinterested. One sleeps to the exact extent to
which he becomes disinterested. A mother who sleeps by the side of her
child will not stir at the sound of thunder, but the sigh of the child
will wake her. Does she really sleep in regard to her child? We do not
sleep in regard to what continues to interest us.

"You ask me what it is that I do when I dream? I will tell you what you
do when you are awake. You take me, the me of dreams, me the totality of
your past, and you force me, by making me smaller and smaller, to fit
into the little circle that you trace around your present action. That
is what it is to be awake. That is what it is to live the normal
psychical life. It is to battle. It is to will. As for the dream, have
you really any need that I should explain it? It is the state into which
you naturally fall when you let yourself go, when you no longer have the
power to concentrate yourself upon a single point, when you have ceased
to will. What needs much more to be explained is the marvelous mechanism
by which at any moment your will obtains instantly, and almost
unconsciously, the concentration of all that you have within you upon
one and the same point, the point that interests you. But to explain
this is the task of normal psychology, of the psychology of waking, for
willing and waking are one and the same thing."

This is what the dreaming ego would say. And it would tell us a great
many other things still if we could let it talk freely. But let us sum
up briefly the essential difference which separates a dream from the
waking state. In the dream the same faculties are exercised as during
wakin