Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/106

 am hanging, but I look only up, and my terror disappears. As frequently happens in a dream, a voice says to me:

“Observe! It is it!”

And I look farther and farther into the infinity above me, and I feel that I am calming down; I remember everything which has happened, and I recall how it has all happened,—how I moved my legs, how I hung down, how I became frightened, and how I saved myself from terror by looking up. And I ask myself: “Well, am I now still hanging in the same way? I do not so much look around as feel with my whole body the point of support on which I am suspended. I see that I no longer hang or fall, but am firmly held. I ask myself how I am held; I feel around and look about me, and I see that beneath me, under the middle of my body, there is one strip, and that, looking up, I lie on it in the most stable equilibrium, and that it is that strip alone that has been holding me up all the while.

As happens in a dream, I now see the mechanism by means of which I am held, and I find it very natural, comprehensible, and incontestable, although in waking this mechanism has no meaning whatever. In my sleep I even wonder how it was that I could not understand it before. It turns out that at my head there is a pillar, and the stability of this pillar is subject to no doubt, although this slender pillar has nothing to stand on. Then there is a loop which is ingeniously and yet simply attached to the pillar, and if you lie with the middle of your body in this loop and look up, there cannot even be a question about falling. All that was clear to me, and I was happy and calm. It was as though some one were saying to me: “Remember! Do not forget!”

And I awoke.

1882.