There are days when the return to life is painful and distressing. One leaves the realm of sleep against one's will. Nothing has happened, except an awareness that the deeper and truer reality belongs to the world of the unconscious.

Thus one morning I opened my eyes involuntarily, struggling frantically to fall back into that condition of bliss in which dream had wrapped me. So chagrined was I to find myself awake that I was on the point of tears. I closed my eyes and tried ti sink back again into the world from which I had been so cruelly ejected. It was useless. I tried every device I had ever heard of but I could not more accomplish the trick than one can stop a bullet in fight and restore it to the empty chamber of a revolver.

What remained, however, was the aura of the dream: in that I lingered voluptuously. Some deep purpose had been fulfilled, but before I had been given time to read the significance of it the slate had been sponged and I was thrust out, out into a world whose one solution for everything is death.

There were only a few tangible shreds in my hand and, as with those crumbs which the poor are supposed to gather from the tables of the rich, I clung to them greedily. But the crumbs dropped from the table of sleep are like the meager facts in a crime whose solution must ever remain a mystery. Those dripping images which, in the act of awakening, one spirits across the threshold like a mystic smuggler have a way of undergoing the most heartrending transformations on the hither side. They melt like an ice cream on a sultry day in August. And yet, as they merge toward the inchoate magma which is the very stuff of the soul, some blurred knot of remembrance keeps alive - forever, it would seem- the dim and velvety outline of a palpable, sentient continuum wherein they and have, not their being, but reality. Reality! That which embraces, sustains and exalts life. It is in this stream that one craves to return and remain forever immersed.

p. 291 - 292

Sexus, Henry Miller