Neutral Awakening

Interest in certain type of awakening: the white, neutral awakening: for a few seconds, whatever Care one felt when one went to sleep, pure moment of Carelessness, forgetfulness of evil, vice in its purest state, kind of clear joy in C major; then the earlier Care falls upon you like a great black bird: the day begins.

This suspended-time (….): like an airlock, not perhaps between two worlds (dream awake) but between two bodies. → Time that borders on “nature”, a kind of groping between the immortal (or close to death) body and the anxious (involved in “life,” in the activist sense of the term…) body.

Belated and slow understanding.

…this neutral awakening – precious, rare, fragile, brief – relates back to the substance of sleep: it is like a readable (perceptible, verbalizable) version of utopian sleep …that can only be inferred from some privileged awakenings, so fragile that they are heart-rending.

Dream is not part of this sleep. The equation sleep=dream is something else. The utopia of sleep is dreamless.

…what the neutral awakening allows me to retain from it (utopian sleep) is a kind of slack time (between the tides of worry and of excitement), where I see (I sip) life, aliveness, in its purity, which is to say outside the will-to-live.

Utopian sleep (dreamless), falling asleep: unproductive: …a kind of unconditional expenditure

Roland Barthes, The Neutral, 37-8.