Within a budding grove Marcel Proust

“Suddenly I fell asleep, plunged into that deep slumber in which vistas are opened to us of a return to childhood, the recapture of past years, and forgotten feelings, of disincarnation, the transmigration of souls, the evoking of the dead, the illusions of madness, retrogression towards the most elementary of the natural kingdoms for we say that we often see animals in our dreams, but we forget that almost always we are ourselves animals therein, deprived of that reasoning power which projects upon things the light of certainty; on the contrary we bring to bear on the spectacle of life only a dubious vision, extinguished anew every moment by oblivion, the former reality fading before that which follows it as one projection of a magic lantern fades before the next as we change the slide), all those mysteries which we imagine ourselves not to know and into which
are in reality initiated almost every night, as into the other great mystery of extinction and resurrection. Rendered more vagabond by the diffculty of digesting my Rivebelle dinner,
the successive and fickering illumination of shadowy zones of my past made of me a person for whom the supreme happiness
would have been to meet Legrandin, with whom I had just been talking in my dream.
And then, even my own life was entirely hidden from me by a new scene, like the drop lowered right at the front of the stage before which, while the scene shifters are busy behind, actors appear in an interim turn. The turn in which I was now playing a part was in the manner of oriental tales;”

pg 461-462