A patchwork of times, overlapping habitations like windowed cells in each of which he awoke to some arrangement of purposes and responses, and from each of which he could more or less make out the others, scattered away in every direction, strewn over hills, clumped in valleys, fading in the mist. A soothing image perhaps but belying the sense of being bustled from one to the next, the inexorable directionality, and the drop into darkness at the end. The mixture of familiarity and astonishment that ruled over the rapidly succeeding tableaux in dreams, not persons in scenes but personages in scenarios, was truer to this mutability than the complacency of the waking self with its feet squarely on the ground. His assumption was that it was himself that kept moving, kept waking up, kept discovering himself in new places, but there was no evidence whatsoever that he ever left whatever cell it was in which considered such questions, or any other, including this.