WHEN A SLEEPER WAKES

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4687, 14 April 1924, Page 3

WHEN A SLEEPER WAKES

Host of our life we asleep, not only when we are unconscious in our beds, but also when we are walking about. I’lato’s idea was that the best of* what we think in tiiis consists in a few things we remember from a. previous existence ; and Wordsworth said that “our birth is but sleep and a forgetting.”

Sometimes there comes to us a sharp consciousness of the unreality of our existence. The sense of its dream stuff invades us. We and all men and women seem somnambulists. Then come those things destiny has set out for our awakening; sharp spines of pain, thunder crashes of tragedy, lightning darts of disaster ; or perhaps the comic, for sometimes a smile or a gibe can “stab us wide awake” better than the surgical blade of sorrow.

The woman in society has one ef these moments, a shattering vision of what her life might mean if it were real. The woman over her washtub stuns, looks up—a thought has whipped her tired mind awake -, it is but a passing glimpse, and life descend.again into the suds. The business man leaves his papers on the desk and looks far away ’ His soul rises for a moment into what life plight be, as a flying fish leaps a gleaming flash into the air.

Death is the supreme bwakeiier. Then the usual and crowding affairs of existence, that seemed 1 so weighty, dissolve into their true nothingness, and the great realities rise like moons upon the soul. The dream is over. When the body goes to its last bed the soul gets up