‘We wanted to be all of a piece. And we couldn’t bring it off. Because we just aren’t all of a piece. We wanted first to have nothing but nice daytime selves, awfully nice and kind and refined. But it didn’t work. Because whether we want it or not, we’ve got night-time selves. And the most spiritual woman ever born or made has to perform her natural functions just like anybody else. We must always keep in line with this fact.
Well, then, we have night-time selves. And the night-self is the very basis of the dynamic self. The blood-consciousness and the blood-passion is the very source and origin of us. Not that we can stay at the source. Nor even make a goal of the source, as Freud does. The business of living is to travel away from the source. But you must start every single day fresh from the source. You must rise every day afresh out of the dark sea of the blood.
When you go to sleep at night, you have to say:
 Here dies the man I am and know myself to be.
And when you rise in the morning you have to say:
 Here rises an unknown quantity which is still myself.’ (D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious).

‘We have made a corresponding mistake in sleeping on into the day. Once the sun rises our constitution changes. Once the sun is well up our sleep—supposing our life fairly normal—is no longer truly sleep. When the sun comes up the centers of active dynamic upper consciousness begin to wake. The blood changes its vibration and even its chemical constitution. And then we too ought to wake. We do ourselves great damage by sleeping too long into the day. The half-hour’s sleep after midday meal is a readjustment. But the long hours of morning sleep are just a damage. We submit our now active centers of upper consciousness to the dominion of the blood-automatic flow. We chain ourselves down in our morning sleep. We transmute the morning’s blood-strength into false dreams and into an ever-increasing force of inertia. And naturally, in the same line of inertia we persist from bad to worse.
With the result that our chained-down, active nerve-centers are half-shattered before we arise. We never become newly day-conscious, because we have subjected our powerful centers of day-consciousness to be trampled and wasted into dreams and inertia by the heavy flow of the blood-automatism in the morning sleeps. Then we arise with a feeling of the monotony and automatism of life. There is no good, glad refreshing. We feel tired to start with. And so we protract our day-consciousness on into the night, when we do at last begin to come awake, and we tell ourselves we must sleep, sleep, sleep in the morning and the daytime. It is better to sleep only six hours than to prolong sleep on and on when the sun has risen. Every man and woman should be forced out of bed soon after the sun has risen: particularly the nervous ones. And forced into physical activity. Soon after dawn the vast majority of people should be hard at work. If not, they will soon be nervously diseased.’ (D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious).

‘The earth’s center is no accident. It is the great individual pole of us who die. It is the center of the first dead body. It is the first germ-cell of death, which germ-cell threw out the great nuclei of the sun and the moon. To this center of our earth we, as humans, are eternally polarized, as are our trees. Inevitably, we fall to earth. And the clue of us sinks to the earth’s center, the clue of our death, of our weight. And the earth flings us out as wings to the sun and moon: or as the death-germ dividing into two nuclei. So from the earth our radiance is flung to the sun, our marsh-fire to the moon, when we die.

We fall into the earth. But our rising was not from the earth. We rose from the earthless quick, the unfading life. And earth, sun, and moon are born only of our death. But it is only their polarized dynamic connection with us who live which sustains them all in their place and maintains them all in their own activities. The inanimate universe rests absolutely on the life-circuit of living creatures, is built upon the arch which spans the duality of living beings.’ (D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious).