A Further Vigilance at the Heart of the Gathered Night
The dream is a temptation for writing perhaps because writing also has to do with this neutral vigilance that the night of sleep tries to extinguish, but that the night of dream awakens and ceaselessly maintains, while it perpetuates being in a semblance of existence. One must therefore specify that in borrowing from night the neutrality and uncertainty that belong to it, in imitating this power to imitate and to resemble that is without origin, writing not only refuses all the ways of sleep, the opportunities of unconsciousness, and the joys of drowsiness, but it also turns to the dream because the dream, in its refusal to sleep at the heart of sleep, is a further vigilance at the heart of the gathered night, a lucidity that is always present, moving, captive no doubt, and for this reason captivating.
~Maurice Blanchot
“Dreaming, Writing” ~ Friendship (tr. Elizabeth Rottenberg) Stanford : Stanford UP, 1997 / pg. 147
