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Waking and not knowing where or who you are

Proust in

A la recherche du temps perdu In In Search of Lost Time (also known as Remembrance of Things Past)

conjures up that feeling of waking in the middle of the night and not knowing where you are, or indeed at first who you are. It's a feeling which – as the narrator confesses around nine pages into his exploration of this fleeting sensation – never lasts more than a few seconds, but which he finds so unsettling it calls into question the stability of the entire world. As Scott Moncrieff's translation has it:
Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them. For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything revolved around me through the darkness: things, places, years

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