My Year With Proust - Day 203

   "Indeed, what one has meant to do during the day it turns out, sleep intervening, that one accomplishes only in one's dreams, that is to say after it has been diverted by drowsiness into following a different path from that which one would have chosen when awake.  The same story branches off and has a different ending.  When all is said, the world in which we live when we are asleep is so different that people who have difficulty in going to sleep seek first of all to escape from the waking world.  After having desperately, for hours on end, with their eyes closed, revolved in their minds thoughts similar to those which they would have had with their eyes open, they take heart again on noticing that the preceding minute has been weighted down by a line of reasoning in strict contradiction to the laws of logic and the reality of the present, this brief 'absence' signifying that the door is now open through which they may perhaps presently be able to escape from the perception of the real, to advance to a resting place more or less remote from it, which will mean their having a more or less 'good' night. But already a great stride has been made when we turn our backs on the real, when we reach the outer caves in which 'auto-suggestions' prepare - like witches - the hell-broth of imaginary illnesses or of the recurrence of nervous disorders, and watch for the hour when the spasms which have been building up during the unconsciousness of sleep will be unleashed with sufficient force to make sleep cease."

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, p. 84

In his Histories, Herodotus tells us that the Persians considered every important question both sober and drunk.  From Herodotus, "If an important decision is to be made, they discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house where the discussion was held submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober.  If they still approve it, they adopt it; if not, it is abandoned.  Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober, is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk." Now, Herodotus is referred to as the Father of Lies as he is the Father of History, so you always have to take his observations with a grain of salt, but if he's correct in this instance the goal for the Persians was the strike some compromise between the tyranny of logic and the anarchy of flights of fancy.  Reading Proust's thoughts on dreams makes me wonder if we wouldn't be better off if we were able to consider every issue both awake and dreaming.  The waking world offers so little hope, but seemingly just a lot of fear, whereas dreams free us to pursue the gods.   However, if we lived in that world it would be like living perpetually in a David Lynch film.  "But already a great stride has been made when we turn our backs on the real, when we reach the outer caves in which 'auto-suggestions' prepare - like witches - the hell-broth of imaginary illnesses or of the recurrence of nervous disorders, and watch for the hour when the spasms which have been building up during the unconsciousness of sleep will be unleashed with sufficient force to make sleep cease."