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 had 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.
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