Music Welcome to snoozecast, the podcast designed to help you fall asleep. Find us at snoozecast.com and if you enjoy our show, please share us with a friend. This episode is brought to you by The Cheeks of a Baby. Tonight we'll read Overture, the opening to French writer Marcel Proust's monumental In Search of Lost Time, which is 7 volumes long and first published in 1913. In search of lost time, follows the narrator's recollections and experiences in late 19th and early 20th century High Society France, while reflecting on the loss of time and lack of meaning in the world. Proust's masterpiece is known for its long, winding sentences, philosophical digressions, and deep attention to memory, particularly in voluntary memory, like the famous taste of a Madeline dipped in tea. Rather than a tightly plotted story, it reads more like a meditation, where every detail or emotion may unfold over pages. The overture introduces this dreamlike style, often blurring the line between waking and sleep. Present and past. Let's get cozy. Close your eyes. Relax your body into the softness of your bed. Now, take a few deep breaths. For a long time, I used to go to bed early. Sometimes when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say I'm going to sleep. And half an hour later, the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me. I would try to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands and to blow out the light. I had been thinking all the time while I was asleep of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book. This impression would persist for some moments after I was awake. It did not disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible Thus the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit.

The subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no. And at the same time, my sight would return, and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness. Pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more perhaps for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible without a cause, a matter dark indeed. I would ask myself what time it could be. I could hear the whistling of trains which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance, like the note of a bird in a forest. Showed me in perspective the deserted countryside, through which a traveler would be hurrying towards the nearest station. The path that he followed being fixed forever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place, to doing unusual things, to the last words of conversation, to farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp, which echoed still in his ears amid the silence of the night, and to the delightful prospect of being once again at home. I would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my pillow, as plump and blooming, as the cheeks of babyhood. Or I would strike a match to look at my watch, nearly midnight. Oh, joy of joy, it is morning, the servants will be about in a minute. He can ring, and someone will come to look after him. The thought of being made comfortable gives him strength to endure. He is certain he heard footsteps. They come near and then die away. The ray of light beneath his door is extinguished. It is midnight. Someone has turned out the gas. The last servant has gone to bed. And he must lie all night with no one to bring him any help. I would fall asleep, and often I would be awake again for short snatches only, just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the Wayne Scott, or to open my eyes to settle the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness. To savor an instantaneous flash of perception, the sleep which lay heavy upon the furniture, the room, the whole surroundings of which I formed, but an insignificant part, and whose unconsciousness I should very soon return to share. Or perhaps, while I was asleep, I had returned without the least effort to an earlier stage in my life, now forever outgrown, and had come under the thrall of one of my childish terrors, such as that old terror of my great uncles pulling my curls, which was affectionately dispelled on the day, the dawn of a new era to me, on which they were finally cropped from my head. I had forgotten that event during my sleep. I remembered it again immediately, I had succeeded in making myself wake up to escape my great

uncle's fingers. Still, as a measure of precaution, I would bury the whole of my head in the pillow before returning to the world of dreams. When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. instinctively when he awakens. He looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth's surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers. But this ordered procession is apt to grow confused and to break its ranks. Suppose that towards morning sleep descends upon him while he is reading in quite a different position from that in which he normally goes to sleep. He has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back in its course. And at the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the time, but will conclude that he has just gone to bed. Or suppose that he gets drowsy in some even more abnormal position, sitting in an arm chair say after dinner. Then the The world will fall topsy turvy from its orbit.

The magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space. And when he opens his eyes again, he will imagine that he went to sleep months earlier and in some far distant country. But for me, it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness. For then, I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep. And when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was. I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness. I was more destitute of human qualities than the caved weller, but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a rope, let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not being, from which I could never have escaped by myself. In a flash, I would traverse in surmount centuries of civilization, and out of a half-visualized succession of oil lamps followed by shirts with turned-down collars, would put together by degrees the component parts of my ego. Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions 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 would be moving round me through the darkness. Things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, make an effort to construe the form which its tiredness took as an orientation of its various members, so as to induce from that where the wall lay and the furniture stood, to piece together and to give a name to the house in which it must be living. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulder blades, offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept, while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirling madly through the darkness, and even before my brain, lingering in consideration of when things had happened and of what they had looked like, had collected sufficient impressions to enable it to identify the room, my body would recall from each room in succession what the bed was

like where the doors were how delight came in at the windows whether there was a passage outside what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep and had found there when I awoke. The stiffened side underneath my body would, for instance, in trying to fix its position, imagine itself to be lying face to the wall in a big bed with a canopy, and at once I would say to myself, why, I must have gone to sleep after all, and Mamma never came to say good night. For I was in the country with my grandfather, who died years ago, and my body, the side upon which I was lying, loyally preserving from the past an impression which by mind should never have forgotten. Brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the night light in its bowl of bohemian glass, shaped like a heron and hung by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney piece of sienna marble in my bedroom at Combre, in my great-h's house, in those far distant days which, at the moment of waking, seemed present without being clearly penned, but would become planar in a little while well, when I was properly awake. Then would come up the memory of a fresh position, the walls slid away in another direction. I was in my room in the house in the country. Good heavens, it must be ten o'clock, they will have finished dinner. I must have overslapped

myself in the little nap which I always take when I come in from my walk before dressing for the evening. For many years have now elapsed since the combray days when coming in from the longest and latest walks, I would still be in time to see the reflection of the sunset glowing in the pains of my bedroom window. It is a very different kind of existence there now, and a different kind of pleasure that I now derive from taking walks here only in the evenings. From visiting by moonlight, the roads on which I used to play as a child in the sunshine, while the bedroom in which I shall presently fall asleep instead of dressing for dinner, from afar off I can see it as we return from our walk with its lamp shining through the window, a solitary beacon in the night. These shifting gusts of memory never lasted for more than a few seconds. It often happened that in my spell of uncertainty as to where I was, I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that uncertainty was composed any more than when we watch a horse running. We isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscope.

But I had seen first one, and then another of the rooms in which I had slept during my life,

and in the end I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream.

Rooms in winter, where on going to bed, I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all of which things I would contrive with the infinite patience of birds building their nests to cement into one hole, rooms where, in a keen frost, I would fill the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world, like the sea swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth. And where the fire keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up as it were in a great cloak of snug and savory air, shot with the glow of the logs which would break out again in flame in a sort of alcove without walls. A cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself. A zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature, as gusts of air ran across them to strike freshly upon my face, from the corners of the room, or from parts near the window, or far from the fireplace, which had therefore remained cold, or rooms summer, where I would delight to feel myself a part of the warm evening, where the moonlight striking upon the half-open shutters would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted ladder, where I would fall asleep, as it might be in the open air, like a tit mouse which the breeze keeps poised in the focus of a sunbeam. Or sometimes, the Louis XVIth Room, so cheerful that I could never really feel unhappy even on my first night in it. That room where the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling would part ever so gracefully to indicate where the bed was and to keep it separate. Sometimes again that little room with the high ceiling hollowed in the form of a pyramid out of two separate stories and partly walled with mahogany, in which from the first moment my mind was drugged by the unfamiliar scent of flowering grasses. Convinced of the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of a clock, the chatter-don at the top of its voice as though I were not there. While a strange and pitiless mirror was square feet, which stood across one corner of the room. Cleared for itself itself a sight I had not looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision. That room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its morings,, to elongate itself upwards, so as to take on the exact shape of the room, to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed So many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed.

My eyes staring upwards, my nostrils sniffing, my heart beating until custom had changed the color of the curtains. the clock keep quiet. Brought an expression of pity to the slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling. Custom, that skillful but unhurrying manager who begins in my mind for weeks on end with her provisional arrangements, whom the mind, for all that, is fortunate in discovering. For without the help of custom, it would never contrive by its own efforts to make any room seem habitable. Certainly, I was now well awake. My body had turned about for the last time, and the good angel of certainty had made all the surrounding objects stand still. It set me down under my bedclothes, in my bedroom, and had fixed, approximately in their right places in the uncertain light, my chest of drawers, my writing table, my fireplace, the window overlooking the street, and both the doors. But it was no good by knowing that I was not in any of those houses of which, in the stupid moment of waking if I I had not caught sight exactly, I could still believe in their possible presence. For memory was now set in motion. As a rule, I did not attempt to go to sleep again at once, but used to spend the greater part of the night, recalling

our life in the old days with my great aunt, at Balbek, Paris, Venice, and the rest. Remembering again all the places and people that I had known, what I had actually seen of them and what others had told me. At Combre, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should have to go up to bed and to lie there,

unsleeping, far from my mother and grandmother. My bedroom became the fixed point on which my thoughts were centered. Someone had had the happy idea of giving me to distract me on evenings when I seemed normally wretched, a magic lantern which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner time to come, in the manner of the master builders and glass painters of Gothic days, it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls and impalpable air descents. Supernatural phenomena of many colors, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window. But my sorrows were only increased, because This is change of lighting destroyed as nothing else could have done. The customary impression I had formed of my room, thanks to which the room itself, but for having to go to bed in it, had become quite indirable. For now, I no longer recognized it, as though I were in a room in some hotel or furnished lodging in a place where I had just arrived by train for the first time. riding at at a jerky trot, Golo, his mind filled with an infamous design, issued from the little three-cornered forest which died dark grain the slope of a convenient hill, and it bounced by leaps and bounds toward the castle of Porge and a Veeve de Pervant. This castle was cut off short by a curved line which was in fact the circumference of one of the transparent ovals in the slides which

were pushed into position through a slot in the lantern. It was only the wing of a castle, and in front of it stretched a more on which Genevieve stood,

Lost in contemplation, wearing a blue girdle. The castle and the more were yellow, But I could tell their color without waiting to see them. For before the slides made their appearance, the old, gold, sonorous name of Brebont had given me an unmistakable clue. The low stopped for a moment and listened sadly to the little speech read aloud by my great aunt, which he seemed perfectly to understand, for he modified his attitude with the docility notoid of a degree of majesty. Yn yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n y