“We call that a leaden sleep, and it seems as if, during the few minutes after

such a sleep has ended, we have ourselves turned into mere figures of lead.
Identity has vanished. So, how then, searching for our thoughts, our identities
as we search for lost objects, do we eventually recover our own self rather than
any other? Why, when we regain consciousness, is it not the identity other
than the one we had previously that is embodied in us? It is not clear what
dictates the choice nor why, among the millions of human beings we might be,
it is the being we were the day before that we unerringly grasp. What is it that
guides us when there has been a genuine interruption (whether it be that we
have been totally taken over by sleep or that our dreams have been utterly
different from ourselves)? What has happened really is a death, as when the
heart has ceased to beat and a rhythmical traction of the tongue revives us. No
doubt the room, even if we have seen it only once before, awakens memories to
which older memories cling; or possibly some of them lay dormant inside us
and we now become conscious of them. The resurrection that takes place when
we wake up – after that insufficient attack of mental derangement we call sleep
– must in the end be similar to what happens when we recall a line, a line of
poetry or a refrain we had forgotten . And perhaps the ressurection of the soul
after soul after death is to be thought of as a phenomenon of memory.”

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way