Sleep Is Apt to Break Its Ranks

When a man is asleep, he has in a circle around him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Distinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth's surface during his slumbers. But this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks. When I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure, at first, who I was. In a flash I would traverse in surmount centuries of civilization, and out of a half-visualized succession of oil lamps, followed by shirts who turned down colors