Sleeping, fishing, feeding : indisputably the triad of happiness...

You enter the clear and pure water of a pond. You carry on getting down. Mildness has progressively enveloped you to the point of immersing you totally.

Indifferent to what is to come next, freed from the obsession of death, you experience the highest feeling of fusion with the great Whole. You enter a state of unconsciousness or omniscience – you do not quite know. Whatever may happen to you, you do not give a damn. Could this last forever !

There, you have lost all ambition but to let Mother Nature carry you. An irrepressible wish to earth yourself, to regress to vegetal state.

Ha ! Nostalgia of the primitive time when man lived on its generous fruits... scarce but unforgettably generous. Picking berries, fishing, they had no other purpose but to survive in a simple way, with no sophistication, no ambition !

The mild placental water is progressively cooling down and the cold gets you out of your stupor : alone, you are now floating in the middle of a huge underground dark lake. Like a premonition, you get overwhelmed with apprehension. Your skin raises all its hairs; you turn pale. And like an answer to your nightmare, a shadow appears beneath your exposed belly.

You are nothing but a prey : a shark suddenly appears from the gloomy depths and swims around and irresistibly closer to you. Fear twists your throat and your lungs.

You can feel it going around you more than you can see it. Sometimes though, a glossy eye shows up from under your wake. Sometimes a terrible fin brushes against you.

So you start a crawl towards the shore. But you are paralysed. The sensation of being snatched off at any time by the wild jaws shatters your little remaining strength while every single move seems to last forever.

Your thighs shiver every time a wave moved by the huge mass reaches them. To die or not to die, never mind ! You wish only one thing : that the torment ends.

All the same, safe and sound, with your nerves badly afflicted, you manage to reach the shore of a cave. You can not hold a scream, which shakes your whole body and ruffles your pores.

Your hair has turned white. You stay about ten minutes, confused, staring at the placid lacquer stretch that no fin comes to disrupt.

You slowly come to. You feel your brain influx again. So reflection may begin. How the hell is it possible ? Your naive faith in nature took a blow... In this Hell where everything seems to have an allegoric meaning, how could that experience not have an obvious sense ! There must be one.

The water dream, the fear of being eaten by the same element ! Of course all that calls to mind the devouring mother who first, protects you within her womb, and then prevents you from getting out or swallows you again, stops you from living and does not tolerate any awakening !

By God ! That is the way nature really is: a non-loving mother ! Thus you imagine the poor condition of your prehistoric ancestor in a totally different way : hounded, skinless and exposed, with so very few instincts that he is left to the arbitrary contingency of nature whom, fiery mother-in-law, strikes blindfolded without any concern for killing her silliest son.

Lost and unpolished, that is what the Homo was before he became Sapiens. His life was left to chance and continual insecurity. No. Thinking about it, security and comfort are luxuries that you are not ready to give up...

You can hardly imagine yourself having to fight for your meatloaf with a bone fragment or a flint stone. You are not alert enough to escape the sabre fang tiger or the horn wound inflicted by what you coveted as a prey.

Besides, that is why man was meant to subdue nature : it was this or being eaten !

Giving up devouring meant being doomed to extinction, you reckon.

Thus you decide that it is not time for a sleep. But what is the way forward from here ? The cave is dark and it is impossible to know whether it is a passageway.

Yet it is this or going back to the water for other shores. You have your back to the wall.