My Years With Proust - Day 430

   One can of course maintain that there is but one time, for the futile reason that it is by looking at the clock that one established as being merely a quarter of an hour what one had supposed a day.  But at the moment of establishing this, one is precisely a man awake, immersed in the time of waking men, having deserted the other time.  Perhaps indeed more than another time: another life.  We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence.  To take only the most grossly sensual of them all, which of us, on waking, has not felt a certain irritation at having experienced in his sleep a pleasure which, if he is anxious not to tire himself, he is not, once he is awake, at liberty to repeated indefinitely during that day.  It seems a positive waste.  We have had pleasure in another life which is not ours.  If we enter up in a budget the pains and pleasures of dreams (which generally vanish soon enough after our waking), it is not in the current account of our everyday life.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 1015

Proust continues his discourse on sleep and the differences between the waking world and the sleeping world.  Included in this reflection is what may be the most gently evasive discussion of a wet dream one can imagine: "We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence.  To take only the most grossly sensual of them all, which of us, on waking, has not felt a certain irritation at having experienced in his sleep a pleasure which, if he is anxious not to tire himself, he is not, once he is awake, at liberty to repeated indefinitely during that day.  It seems a positive waste."  That said, it forms a nice metaphor for the separation between the two worlds, and our frustration at "wasting" beauty in a dream that we cannot produce in the waking world.  Of course, there's also a lesson here.  The most obvious reason why you might have a wet dream is that you're not having any sex in the waking world, and thus you should be trying to live your life more passionately and fully.  Is there a Walter Mitty-esque correlation between a tedious life and an extraordinary dream life (even a waking dream life)?  Maybe we should hope for a life where we have tedious dreams.