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 ha