Sleeper, Waking is a book of late night reveries in old age. A reverie is a half-conscious, half dream-like state in which all the stuff of the real world is no less real but loosed from the ties of time, freeing childhood woods, rivers, lakes, faces one has known, lives one has shared, cities visited or lived in, books read, music heard, past passions and lost lovers, even old fears and dreads to return: all of a life mingling in one moment. It is a kind of suspended place in-between the present world and some other before or after it, between now and then. It is, as one dwells in it, to discover how at eighty, as you lie half-awake at night, the past is relived for you or the world you knew dreamed back to sleep.
