d 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 identify the room, it, my body,
would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where
the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a
passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had
found there when I awoke. The stiffened side underneath my body would,
for instance, in trying to fix its position, imagine itself to be lying,
face to the wall, in a big bed with a canopy; and at once I would say to
myself, "Why, I must have gone to sleep after all, and Mamma never came
to say good night!" for I was in the country with my grandfather