I “had to get up.” I didn’t have anything I needed to be up for, yet I “had to get up” because “pleasures were like nails,” according to Socrates, “nailing the soul to the body,” which was probably a roughly accurate way to think of how pleasures were, I supposed at the time, pleasures innuring us to being pleased and making us expect to be pleased; and of course lying here was a definite pleasure; and so likely I would feel at once, upon dying, the sudden wrenching up of the weight of all those nails, that had been pounded into me during moments of pleasure like this; I would feel in reverse, and all at once, the pleasure of all those mornings I didn’t get immediately up.
But, again, I didn’t actually “have to” get up (I had no commitments, no work or appointments); in this case, the only question determining whether I would or would not get up involved what I thought death was and what I thought its importance to be.
I lay there thinking of the arrangement of my coverings and considering if the arrangement was quite optimally suited to my comfort. I lay there thinking of how I had slept: not well. I lay there thinking — growing gradually more cognizant of how much I was thinking and of how active what I called my mind was becoming relative to what I called my body. If I wanted to get up, I didn’t have to actually will myself to get up, I supposed, which would probably be ineffective in any case: all I had to do was what I was doing: continue thinking, and then the rest of my body would get infected with the brain’s activity and I would be up. Although in that case there was nothing for me to do in order to get up, as I was already thinking, and had no choice in the matter. I was thinking more and more, and soon this thinking would attain a critical mass and result in me getting up.
Now, on occasions when I did feel I had a choice in whether or not I could return to sleep, I would try to remember my dreams more vividly, which seemed to me signposts back to unconscious. If I could simply remember the dream better, I was thinking, I would find myself within it again, I would pick up where I left off, dreaming and therefore also sleeping again. The dream I had woken with could not, after all, be so very far away — and remembering was very close to dreaming, these must be abutting, even adjoining compartments, I believed — so if I could only press a bit harder on the gate, if I could only hop over the low stone wall, step in through the shared bathroom… After all, I wasn’t trying to use my mind to do something magical; to, for example, teleport, or levitate; the only super power I now requested of my mind was that it transition between two of its actual functions: that it go from remembering a dream to actual dreaming … but it inevitably appeared, again, that I in fact had no choice in the matter: I continued to remember I had dreamed and I failed to turn my memories of dreams into dreaming.
I knew that I was tired enough that, if I could only stop thinking, I would probably return to sleep, which I desired, not having anything I “had” to do. But thinking had now become an inescapable crown, like the inevitable sunlight itself, with its message that I would be getting up. Even if I told myself not to, even were I to absolutely insist, the magic carpet would be in effect: my legs would swing over, and I would be half-up.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 