“And sometimes an hour of sleep is a paralytic stroke after which we must regain the use of our limbs, learn to speak again. Will is not enough. We have slept too long, we have ceased to exist. Waking is barely experienced, without consciousness, as a pipe might experience the turning-off of a tap. This is followed by a life more inanimate than that of a jelly-fish; one might think one had been dredged up from the depths of the sea, or released from prison, if one could think anything at all. But then the goddess Mnemotechne leans out from heaven and offers us, in the form of ‘habit of calling for coffee’, the hope of resurrection. But the sudden gift of memory is not always so simple. One often has at hand, in those first minutes when one is letting oneself slip towards awakening, a range of different realities from which one thinks one can choose, like taking a card from a pack. It is Friday morning and one is coming back from a walk, or else it is tea-time at the seaside. The idea of sleep and that one is in bed in one’s nightshirt is often the last to occur. Resurrection does not come immediately, you think you have rung, you haven’t, you turn over insane ideas in your mind. Movement alone restores thought, and when you have actually pressed the electric bell-push, you can say, slowly but clearly, ‘It must be ten o’clock. Bring me my coffee please, Françoise.’ ”

(Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark, p. 109)