Dream Passage of the Day

[Daisy]

"Overworked by Dreams," from A Short History of Decay (1949), by E. M. Cioran (trans. Richard Howard)

If we could conserve the energy we lavish in that series of dreams we nightly leave behind us, the mind's depth and subtlety would reach unimaginable proportions. The scaffolding of a nightmare requires a nervous expenditure more exhausting than the best articulated theoretical construction. How, after waking, begin again the task of aligning ideas when, in our unconscious, we were mixed up with grotesque and marvelous spectacles, we were sailing among the spheres without the shackles of anti-poetic Causality? For hours we were like drunken gods--and suddenly, our open eyes erasing night's infinity, we must resume, in day's mediocrity, the enterprise of insipid problems, without any of the night's hallucinations to help us. The glorious and deadly fantasy was all for nothing then; sleep has exhausted us in vain. Waking, another kind of weariness awaits us; after having had just time enough to forget the night's, we are at grips with the dawn's. We have labored hours and hours in horizontal immobility without our brain's deriving the least advantage of its absurd activity. An imbecile who was not victimized by this waste, who might accumulate all his resources without dissipating them in dreams, would be able--owner of an ideal state of waking--to disentangle all the snags of the metaphysical lies or initiate himself into the most inextricable difficulties of mathematics.
After each night we are emptier: our mysteries and our griefs have leaked away into our dreams. This sleep's labor not only diminishes the power of our thought, but even that of our secrets . . .