From the book
The Green Notebook
Maurice de Guérin · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordRêve and songe can designate sleep dreams or imagined scenes; rêverie often suggests a waking drift of thought and feeling.
- In GuérinThe cathedral episode is explicitly a dream: a woman’s voice enters a space filled with awareness of God.
- In this editionThe English keeps “dreams” and “reveries” in the Mordreux passage rather than flattening both into fantasy.
- A reading distinctionThe translator’s note on magnetic sleep explains an analogy, not an event in Guérin’s medical history.
Meaning
Rêve and songe can designate sleep dreams or imagined scenes; rêverie often suggests a waking drift of thought and feeling. Guérin allows the fields to overlap. Demi-sommeil marks a border state, while extase names transport beyond ordinary self-possession without necessarily implying a supernatural vision.
Use in the book
The cathedral episode is explicitly a dream: a woman’s voice enters a space filled with awareness of God. The repeated figure of the following nights provokes a question rather than a declared explanation. These nocturnal events should be distinguished from the waking reveries produced by sea, landscape, and solitude.
Reverie can calm or excite. Coastal harmonies make an inward paradise; the fusion of natural quiet and stormy feeling creates a tempered ecstasy that retains consciousness of sadness. The summer account of magnetic sleep is an analogy for intense inner activity during bodily repose. Guérin does not say that he actually underwent mesmerism. Its value is to express how a resting person can still undergo growth.
Later dreams become more ambiguous: thought races toward an alluring sign, serious projects dissolve, and the soul follows regions it may never reach. In mourning, imagined forms bring the dead near but also renew the pain that they are accessible only as thought. The notebook therefore cannot be read as simply celebrating dream over reality. It studies a faculty of mediation whose power to preserve, enlarge, and console is inseparable from its capacity to disorient.
Places to read
- 15 June 1833 · ¶1The cathedral and recognized voice belong to an explicitly narrated sleep dream.
- 20 January 1834 · ¶1A tempered ecstasy combines outward quiet with persistent awareness of sadness.
- 20 August 1834 · ¶2Magnetic sleep supplies a comparison for inward activity during apparent inactivity.
- 10 December 1834 · ¶4Dreamlike pursuit is at once seductive, productive of writing, and suspected of deception.
- 12 February 1835 · ¶1Imagining Marie’s spiritual life can restore relation and suddenly intensify loss.
- 19 June 1833 · ¶1A figure has appeared on three successive nights; the brief question supplies neither an identity nor an explanation.
Translation in this edition
The English keeps “dreams” and “reveries” in the Mordreux passage rather than flattening both into fantasy. At 20 August 1834 · ¶2 “like a man bound by magnetic sleep” preserves the comparative construction; translator’s note 13 identifies the historical mesmeric reference.
Source note
The translator’s note on magnetic sleep explains an analogy, not an event in Guérin’s medical history. The dream involving L... is not used to supply an unsupported identification of the woman.