The program was easy to use
The program was user-friendly. nambulism is a form of madness then I was mad at that moment
Sometimes, when I went to bed early, my candle would be scarcely out and my eyes would close so quickly that I didn’t have time to say to myself, “I’m falling asleep”. Half an hour later, the thought that it was time to try to sleep would wake me. I wanted to put down the book I thought I still had in my hands and blow out my light. I hadn’t ceased while sleeping to form reflections on what I just read, but these reflections had taken a rather peculiar turn. It seemed to me that I myself was what the book was talking about and church quartets, the rivalry between Francis the First and Charles V. This belief lived on for a few seconds after my waking shock; my reason, however, lay heavy like scales on my eyes and kept them from realizing that the candlestick was no longer lit. Then it began to grow unintelligible to me, as after metempsychosis do the thoughts of an earlier existence.
The subject of the book detached itself from me; I was free to apply myself to it or not. Immediately, I recovered my sight and I was amazed to find a darkness all around me, soft and restful for my eyes, perhaps even more so for my mind, to which it appeared a thing without cause, incomprehensible, a thing truly dark. I would ask myself what time it might be. I could hear the whistling of the trains, which, remote or nearby, like the singing of a bird in a forest, plotting the distances described to me, the extent of the deserted countryside where the traveler hastens towards the nearest station and the little road he is following will be engraved on his memory by the excitement he owes to new places, to unaccustomed activities, to the recent conversation and the farewells under the unfamiliar lamp that follow him still through the silence of the night, the imminent sweetness of his return.
I would rest my cheeks tenderly against the lovely cheeks of the pillow, which, full and fresh, are like the cheeks of our childhood. I would strike a match to look at my watch; nearly midnight. This is the hour when the sick man who’s been obliged to go off on a journey and has had to sleep in an unfamiliar hotel, awakened by an attack, is cheered to see a ray of light under the door. How fortunate! It’s already morning. In a moment, the servants will be up; he will be able to ring. Someone will come to help him. The hope of being relieved gives him the courage to suffer.
In fact, I thought I heard footsteps. The steps approach then recede and the ray of light that was under my door has disappeared. It’s midnight; they’ve just turned off the gas. The last servant has gone and I will have to suffer the whole night through without remedy. I would go back to sleep and sometimes afterwards woke only briefly for a moment, long enough to hear the organic creek of the woodwork. I opened my eyes and stare at the kaleidoscope of the darkness, savoring in a momentary glimmer of consciousness the sleep into which were plunged the furniture, the room, that whole of which I was only a small part and whose insensibility I would soon return to share.
Or else, while sleeping, I had effortlessly returned to a forever vanished period of my early life, rediscovered one of my childish terrors, such as that my great uncle would pull me by my curls. A terror dispelled on the day the dawned for me of a new era when they were cut off. I’d forgotten that event during my sleep; I recovered its memory as soon as I managed to wake myself up to escape the hands of my great uncle. But, as a precautionary measure, I would completely surround my head with my pillow for returning to the world of dreams.
Sometimes, as Eve was born from one of Adam’s ribs, a woman was born during my sleep from a cramped position of my thigh, formed of the pleasure I was on the point of enjoying. She, I imagined, was the one offering it to me. My body, which felt in hers my own warmth, tried to return to itself inside her. I woke up. The rest of humanity seemed very remote compared with this woman I’d left scarcely a few moments before. My cheek was still warm from her kiss, my body aching from the weight of hers.
If somnambulism is a form of madness, then I was mad at that moment.