The Aquarium of Night

“Reverie, which is thought in its nebulous state, borders closely upon the land of sleep, by which it is bounded as by a wilderness. The discovery of a new world, inhabited by living transparencies, would be the beginning of a knowledge of the vast unknown. Beyond it the possible opens out, an immense realm of other beings, other facts. No supernaturalism, only the occult continuation of an infinite nature… sleep is in contact with the possible, which we also call the improbable. The world of sleep has an existence of its own; night is its own universe. The material nature of man, upon which philosophers tell us that a column of air forty-five miles in height continually presses, is wearied out at night, sinks into lassitude, lies down, and finds repose. The eyes of the flesh are closed; but in that drooping head, less inactive than is supposed, other eyes are opened. The unknown reveals itself. The dark things of the unknown become neighbors of man. Some phantom creation ascends or descends to walk beside us in the dim twilight: some existence altogether different from our own, composed partly of human consciousness, partly of something else, quits his fellows and returns again, after presenting himself for a moment to our inward sight; and the sleeper, not quite seeing, not quite unconscious, beholds around them the strange manifestations of life. glimpses the strange animalities, weird vegetations, terrible or radiant pallors, ghosts, masks, figures, hydras, confusions, moonless moonlights, obscure unmakings of miracle, growths and vanishings with a murky depth, shapes floating in shadow, the whole mystery which we call dreaming, and which is nothing other than the approach of an invisible reality. The dream-world is the Aquarium of Night.”

Victor Hugo, Toilers of the Sea (1866)