The fasting man tells his dream as if he were talking in his sleep. This further side of dream is attainable only through a cleansing analogous to washing, yet totally different. For only from the far bank, from broad daylight, may dream be addressed from the superior vantage of memory.

He has outgrown the protection of dreaming naïveté, and in laying hands on his dream visages without thinking, he surrenders himself. To express this in more modern terms: he betrays himself.

In this condition, the narration of dreams can bring calamity, because a person still half in league with the dream world betrays it in his words and must incur its revenge. He thus avoids a rupture between the nocturnal and the daytime worlds-a precaution justified only by the combustion of dream in a concentrated morning’s work, if not in prayer otherwise this avoidance can be a source of confusion between vital rhythms. He who shuns contact with the day, whether for fear of his fellow men or for the sake of inward composure, is unwilling to eat and disdains his breakfast. For washing brings only the surface of the body and the visible motor functions into the light, while in the deeper strata, even during the morning ablutions, the gray penumbra of dream persists and, indeed, in the solitude of the first waking hour, consolidates itself. In this state, though awake, one remains under the spell of the dream. A popular tradition warns against recounting dreams the next morning on an empty stomach.

One way street benjamin