<‘Morpheus, take me into your embrace.’ Morpheus is a god whose devotee I would most gladly be. Do you recall that young lady who was so offended when someone said to her: ‘Quand je suis passé chez vous, vous étiez encore dans les bras de Morphée’?3 She thought that Morpheus [Morfei] was some man called Andrei Malafei. What a ridiculous name!… But it’s a wonderful expression: dans les bras; I can imagine so vividly and gracefully the position dans les bras – and particularly vividly the bras themselves – arms bare to the shoulder with little dimples and little folds, and a white nightdress indiscreetly open.—How lovely women’s arms are, specially if there is just one little dimple! I stretched myself out in bed. Do you remember, St Thomas4 was always telling us it was bad form to stretch. Just like Diedrichs. The two of them were riding along together. The sport was excellent and just behind them I was riding along too, tally-hoing to my dog Angel, and my other dog Raider was catching enough game for them all, it was a regular slaughter. And wasn’t Seriozha furious!—He was with his sister.—What a charmer Masha is – and what a wife she’d make for someone! Morpheus would make a fine old hunter, if he could cope with a bit of bareback riding, and he might even find you a wife into the bargain.—Phew, just look how St Thomas is bowling along there – and there’s the young lady charging along behind them all; it’s no use just stretching out, though it is really nice dans les bras. At this point I must have fallen asleep properly.—I dreamt that I was trying to catch up with the lady, when suddenly there was a mountain in front of us and I was pushing her, pushing her up it with my hands – but she fell down to the bottom (I had pushed my pillow off the bed), and I rode home to dinner. It was not ready: why not? Vasily started to throw his weight about and to bluster (which made the lady of the house who was on the other side of the partition ask to know what all the noise was about, so the chambermaid explained – I could hear it all, because that too was part of my dream). Vasily came in and everyone was trying to ask him why the dinner wasn’t ready, but they could see – Vasily was wearing a camisole, and a ribbon across his shoulder. I felt scared, and fell to my knees weeping and kissing his feet; I enjoyed this just as much as if I had been kissing her feet – in fact more so. Vasily ignored me and asked: ‘Is it loaded?’ Diedrichs, the pastry-cook from Tula, replied ‘Ready!’—Very well, fire!—And they fired a volley (the shutter banged).—and then there we were walking down Polskaya Street, Vasily and I, but it was no longer Vasily but she. Suddenly, horrors! I noticed that my trousers were so short that my bare knees were showing. I cannot describe how awful I felt (my bare knees had come out of the bedclothes); in my dream I spent a long time trying to cover them up and at last succeeded. But there was more to come: now we were going down Polskaya Street again and the Queen of Württemberg was there; but suddenly I was dancing a Ukrainian kazachok. Why? Because I couldn’t help it. At length someone brought me an overcoat and a pair of boots; but now it was even worse – there were no trousers at all. Of course none of this could be happening in reality: I was most likely asleep and dreaming. I woke up.—And began to drop off again, thinking, then ran out of thoughts and began to see pictures in my imagination, and my imaginings were quite coherent, picturesque even, but then my imagination itself went to sleep, and all that remained were obscure and confused notions; and then my body too fell asleep. A dream is always composed of first and last impressions.>
It seemed to me that now, underneath this blanket, nothing and no one could possibly get at me.—Sleep is a state of our existence in which we completely lose the consciousness of ourselves; but since a man falls asleep by degrees, he also loses consciousness by degrees.—Consciousness is another name for what we call our soul; but the word soul denotes something which is a unity, whereas there are as many consciousnesses as there are different elements which make up a human being. As I see it there are three of these: (1) the mind, (2) the emotions, (3) the body. (1) is the highest of the three, and this type of consciousness is confined to developed human beings – brute beasts and brutish humans do not possess it; this is the first element to fall asleep. (2) The consciousness of emotion is also the property of human beings alone, and it goes to sleep after the first sort of consciousness. (3) The consciousness of the body goes to sleep last of all, and almost never completely. This gradualness of falling asleep is not to be found in animals, nor in human beings who become unconscious as a result of some powerful shock, or of drunkenness. The consciousness of being asleep is liable to wake us up again at once.
Our remembrance of the time we spend asleep is not derived from the same source as our remembrance of real life – from memory, the capacity to recall our impressions – but from the capacity to group our impressions together. At the moment of waking we bring together all the impressions we have had while going to sleep and while sleeping (a man is hardly ever completely asleep) into a unity under the influence of the particular impression which contributed to our waking up – and waking up, like going to sleep, proceeds by degrees, from the lowest level to the highest.—This operation takes place so swiftly that it is hard to be completely aware of it, and being accustomed as we are to the sequential nature of things and to the mould of time in which life reveals itself to us, we accept this aggregate of impressions as the remembrance of the time we have spent asleep.—How are you to explain the fact that you may have a long dream which ends with precisely that circumstance which has woken you up? You dream that you are going out hunting, you load your rifle, spring the game, take aim and fire; and the noise you took for the gunshot was actually the water carafe which you have upset on to the floor in your sleep. Or again, you arrive at your friend N.’s house and you are waiting to see him; at length a servant appears and announces that N. has just come in; but in the real world it is your own servant who is talking to you in order to wake you up. In recognizing the truth of this, God forbid that you should believe in all those dreams related to you by people who have invariably seen something in them, and what is more, something both meaningful and important.
These people, from their habit of drawing conclusions from dreams on the basis of guesses, have provided themselves with a particular form to which they reduce everything: they make up any deficiencies from their own imagination, and reject anything which refuses to fit into the given form. For example, a mother will tell you how she dreamed that she saw her daughter flying off into the heavens and saying ‘Goodbye, dearest Mamma, I shall pray for you!’ Whereas she actually dreamed that her daughter was climbing on to the house roof, not saying anything, and that this daughter, as she climbed higher and higher, suddenly turned into Ivan the cook and said ‘You can’t climb up here.’