It [Joyce’s “Ulysses”] plays on the reader’s sympathies to his own undoing unless sleep kindly intervenes and puts a stop to this drain of energy. Arrived at page 135, after making several heroic efforts to get at the book, to “do it justice”, as the phrase goes, I fell at last into profound slumber.
sleepquotes
But the state of sleep, we found, is not characterized by the disintegration of psychical interconnections, but by the focus on the wish to sleep by the psychical system in control of the day.
In this scheme, the “unconscious” and the “preconscious” are agencies or authorities (Instanzen) which the wish has to satisfy; the unconscious is more tolerant, and helps the wish to smuggle itself past the censorship of the preconscious. As a result, psychical energy is discharged without disturbing sleep.
Our life is to be regarded as a loan received from death, with sleep as the daily interest on this loan.
We sleep peaceably in our beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf.
Blessed are the sleepy ones: for they shall soon fall off.
If I could drown in sleep as I drown in fear I would be no longer alive.
I can’t sleep and the rain is determined not to quit soliloquizing about you all night. I can’t help but overhear, my dear.
What if I slept a little more and forgot about all this nonsense.
That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
