Dorveille: sleeping on horseback and the apple-round space

Dorveille. A wonderful term that is sadly obsolescent in Frace, and has no satisfactory equivalent in English, though Coleson Whitehead uses it - with deliberate misspelling as "dorvay" - in his marvelous crime novel Harlem Shuffle. 
     Dorveille, "sleep-wake", is the liminal space between sleep and awake, well-known to active dreamers of any era as the royal road to lucid dream adventures, the site of creative breakthroughs and sudden illumination, and prime time for encounters with daimons, the departed, minor deities and other visitors. It is a term and a state of awareness that had great respect in the Middle Ages. 
    Michel Stanesco, a leading scholar of medieval literature, explains that in the world of the Middle Ages, where the terrestrial and the celestial coexisted, "there were no brusque and decisive dichotomies between the real and the imaginal, the natural and the supernatural, the possible and the impossible. This is why there were no definitive oppositions between dream and reality, between sleep and waking." [1] So the state of dorveille, in which the protagonist, half sleeping, moves in an ambiguous universe, between the mysterious and the familiar, is seen as normal.
    For the chivalric authors of Romance poetry, dorveille might be attained at clip-clop rhythm, sleeping on a horse. En doormen/sobre chevau – “sleeping on a horse” – was how, famously, Guillaune IX of Aquitaine, produced "a poem about nothing." Dozing on horseback was the frequent condition of the knight in the field. Dropping with fatigue on a long journey, maybe after fighting in a field of war, the knight was often led by his horse, sometimes to realms of wonder, to a magic orchard or a floating chateau, and thought himself in Fairyland or Paradise.
     Chrétien de Troyes, Le chevalier de la charrette (the Knight of the Carriage) described Lancelot’s drifty state as his head drooped over his horse's neck at a ford

Lui meismes en oublie
ne set s’il est, ou s’il n’est mie
ne ne li manbre de son non
ne set s’il est armez ou non
ne set ou va, ne set don’t vient

He himself forgets
what he is or is not
he doesn't remember his name
or whether he is armed or not
he doesn't know if he is coming or going

 

If this does not seem like much of an incentive to sleep on horseback, consider the possible delights of dorveille in bed as recounted by the French medieval poet and chronicler Jean Froissart. He wrote in "Le joli buisson de Jonece" of being transported during dorveille into  a marvelous space that was “round as an apple”. His experience began when he went to bed early on a dreary winter evening. He felt himself gently touched by fire. As he drifted towards sleep, thoughts and memories arose and became visions. Then Venus – no less – carried him to that apple-round space. The colors were blue streaked with white but they changed with the winds. He could not tell the size of the space he was in but he was always at the center.

 

 

1. Michel Stanesco, Jeux d'errance du chevalier médiéval: Aspects ludiques de la fonction guerrière dans la littérature du Moyen Age flamboyant. Leiden: Brill, 1988. p.149