Hypnotic Bedtime Story: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
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Hi, I'm Jessica Porter, and welcome back to Sleep Magic, a podcast where I help you find the magic of your own mind, helping you to sleep better and live better. Thank you everyone for being here. Thanks for spreading the word to your friends and on social media. And if you're in a position to subscribe, thank you for subscribing.

Um, like I mentioned earlier, I'm sort of really slow about finding some of the reviews on Spotify, but I want to read one that I got recently. It goes like this. I'm a 12-year-old kid. I only get one to two hours of sleep, at most three. So my friend suggested this, and at first I was a bit skeptical, but it works so well. I've been doing a lot better at school. Thank you. Oh, man.

Thank you for letting me know and for letting others know. I'm so glad you're learning how to relax yourself at such a young age. And that's helping with school. As we know, sleep is so important and affects our lives in every way. And I don't think I really got that until I started doing this show. So if you're new here, just keep listening. You'll begin to train yourself to relax. And relaxation lives right next door to sleep.

So you're all good. Okay, tonight, Mrs. Dalloway. Before we get started, let's hear a quick word from our sponsors who make this free content possible. Mrs. Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf, published in May of 1925. It details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional upper-class woman in post-First World War England.

It is one of Woolf's best-known novels, and Time magazine called it one of the 100 best English-language novels of all time. We got a really good response after I read from another novel of Woolf's, To the Lighthouse. It was the first work of fiction I read on this podcast, and I think our writing suits itself to our mission here perfectly.

The stream of consciousness for which she was known and celebrated is so fluid and almost musical that it's fun to read and perfect to go to sleep to if you don't feel obligated to follow the plot. So as I read, just let your mind rest on my voice as we ride the lovely waves of Mrs. Dalloway. So get yourself into a safe and comfortable position and let's begin.

Just allow your eyes to close easily and gently. And bring your awareness to your breathing. Just imagine your awareness is like a little surfer surfing the wave of your breath. It may be a very gentle wave or sort of a medium wave, but your awareness is just riding the wave. Good. Now bring your awareness up into your eyelids and imagine that the little muscles of your eyelids

are feeling loose and limp and relaxed. Just let your eyelids get heavy. Imagine that they're sleepy. And as the sleepiness takes over your eyelids and they get heavier and heavier, I'd like you to accept the suggestion that your eyelids are so heavy that they won't open. And in a moment I'm going to ask you to test your eyelids to make sure they won't open by wiggling your eyebrows. And of course you're just pretending that they can't open. So now test them.

Keep your eyes closed, but wiggle your eyebrows. Good, good. Now this relaxation that you have around your eyes is the same quality of relaxation that's already beginning to move throughout your entire body. As you imagine this warm relaxation around your eyes moving back into your head. Imagine the relaxation is taking over every single cell of your brain. Your head is feeling heavy on the pillow.

and the muscles of your face are letting go. As you imagine warm waves of relaxation lapping up against the beach of your mind, feel those warm waves of relaxation lapping up against the beach of your mind as all mental tension disappears. Good. As the warm wave of relaxation moves down now into your shoulders, down into your arms,

relaxation moving all the way down into the palms of your hands, into your fingers, your arms feeling so heavy. Your arms are on vacation. Good. As you bring your awareness now to any sounds that may be going on around you, just relax and open to the sound going on in your environment and make the decision now that those sounds are taking you deeper.

into relaxation. Just let them take you deeper. That's using the magic of your mind as the warm wave of relaxation moves down through your torso. Your whole torso feeling heavy on the bed. The muscles of your belly letting go. The muscles of your back releasing. Your buttocks relaxing as your pelvis feels heavy.

heavy, heavy. As that warm wave of relaxation makes its way all the way down your legs, all the way down into your feet, your toe, your legs are on vacation as they feel heavy on the bed. And as your body is relaxing, your mind is relaxing. And as your mind is relaxing, your body is relaxing. And as your body is relaxing,

Your mind is relaxing and the sound of my voice is taking you deeper and deeper. And soon the sound of my voice will feel far away, distant and comforting. Good. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself, for Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges. Rumpelmeyer's men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway,

What a morning, fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark, what a plunge, for so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Burton into the open air. How fresh, how calm,

Stiller than this, of course, the air was in the early morning, like the flap of a wave, the kiss of a wave, chill and sharp, and yet, for a girl of eighteen, as she then was, solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen, looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them, and the rooks rising, falling,

standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, "'Musing among the vegetables? Was that it? I prefer men to cauliflowers? Was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out onto the terrace. Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July. She forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull. It was his sayings one remembered, his eyes, his pocketknife.'

his smile, his grumpiness. And when millions of things had utterly vanished, how strange it was. A few sayings, like this, about cabbages. She stiffened a little on the curb, waiting for Dirtnal's van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her, knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster. A touch of the bird about her, of the jay,

blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright. For having lived in Westminster, how many years now? Over twenty. One feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush or solemnity.

An indescribable pause, a suspense. But that might be her heart affected, they say, by influenza. Before Big Ben strikes, there, out it, first a warning, musical, then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For heaven only knows why one loves it so.

how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh. But the various frumps, the most dejected of misery sitting on doorsteps, drink their downfall, do the same, can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by acts of parliament for that very reason. They love life, in people's eyes, in the swing of

tramp and trudge, in the bellow and the uproar, the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging, brass bands, barrel organs, in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved, life, London, this moment of June, for it was the middle of June,

The war was over, except for some, like Mrs. Foxcroft at the embassy last night, eating her heart out because that nice boy didn't come home. And now the old manor house must go to a cousin, or Lady Bexborough, who opened a bazaar, they said, with a telegram in her hand. John, her favorite, lost. But it was over, thank heaven, over. It was June. The king and queen were at the palace,

And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket baths. Lords, Ascot, Ranala, and all the rest of it wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air which, as the day wore on, would unwind them.

and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung the whirling young men and laughing girls and their transparent muslins who even now after dancing all night were taking their absurd wooly dogs for a run and even now at this hour discreet old dowagers

were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery. And the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in 18th century settings to tempt Americans. But one must economize not by things rashly for Elizabeth. And she, too, loving it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it,

Since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate, to give her party. But how strange, on entering the park, the silence, the mist, the slow-swimming happy duck, the pouched birds waddling. And who should be coming along?

with his back against the government buildings, most appropriately, carrying a dispatch box stamped with the royal arms. Who but Hugh Whitbread, her old friend Hugh, the admirable Hugh. "'Good morning to you, Clarissa,' said Hugh rather extravagantly, for they had known each other as children. "'Where are you off to?' "'I love walking in London,'

said Mrs. Dalloway. Really, it's better than walking in the country. They had just come up, unfortunately, to see doctors. Other people came to see pictures, go to the opera, take their daughters out. The Whitbreads came to see doctors. Times without number, Clarissa had visited Evelyn Whitbread in a nursing home. Was Evelyn ill again?

Evelyn was a good deal out of sorts, said Hugh, intimating by a kind of pout or swell of his very well-covered, manly, extremely handsome, perfectly upholstered body. He was almost too well-dressed, always, but presumably had to be, with his little job at court, that his wife had some internal ailment.

Nothing serious, which, as an old friend, Clarissa Dalloway would quite understand without requiring him to specify. Ah, yes, she did, of course. What a nuisance. And felt sisterly, and oddly conscious at the same time, of her hat. Not the right hat for the early morning. Was that it?

For Hugh always made her feel as he bustled on, raising his hat rather extravagantly and assuring her that she might be a girl of 18. And of course he was coming to her party tonight, Evelyn absolutely insisted. Only a little late he might be after the party at the palace to which he had to take one of Jim's boys.

She always felt a little skimpy beside Hugh. Schoolgirlish, but attached to him. Partly from having known him always, but she did think him a good sort in his own way. Though Richard was nearly driven mad by him, and as for Peter Walsh, he had never to this day forgiven her for liking him. She could remember scene after scene at Burton. Peter Furious.

Hugh not, of course, his match in any way, but still not a positive imbecile as Peter made out, not a mere barber's block. When his old mother wanted him to give up shooting or to take her to bath, he did it without a word. He was really unselfish, and as for saying, as Peter did, that he had no heart...

no brain, nothing but the manners and breeding of an English gentleman, that was only her dear Peter at his worst. And he could be intolerable. He could be impossible. But adorable to walk with on a morning like this. June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messages were passing from the fleet to the admiralty.

Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that. For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter. She never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks.

But suddenly it would come over her. If he were with me now, what would he say? Some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness, which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people. They came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning. Indeed they did. But Peter, however beautiful the day might be, and the trees, and the grass,

And the little girl in pink. Peter never saw a thing of all that. He would put on his spectacles, if she told him to. He would look. It was the state of the world that interested him. Wagner. Pope's poetry. People's characters eternally. And the defects of her own soul. How he scolded her. How they argued.

She would marry a prime minister and stand at the top of a staircase. The perfect hostess, he called her. She had cried over it in her bedroom. She had the makings of the perfect hostess, he said. So she would still find herself arguing in St. James Park, still making out that she had been right when she had to not to marry him. For in marriage, a little license

A little independence there must be between people living together day in, day out in the same house. Which Richard gave her and she him. Where was he this morning, for instance? Some committee. She never asked what. But with Peter, everything had to be shared. Everything gone into. And it was intolerable. And when it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain,

She had to break with him, or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined. She was convinced, though she had borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart. The grief, the anguish, and then the horror of the moment when someone told her at a concert that he had married a woman met on the boat going to India. Never should she forget all that. Cold,

Heartless. A prude, he called her. Never could she understand how he cared. But those other women did. Presumably. Silly. Pretty. Flimsy nincompoops. And she wasted her pity. For he was quite happy, he assured her. Perfectly happy. Though he had never done a thing that they talked of. His whole life had been a failure. It made her angry still.

She had reached the park gates. She stood for a moment, looking at the omnibuses in Piccadilly. She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young, at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything, at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense

as she watched the taxicabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone. She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraulein Daniels gave them, she could not think. She knew nothing.

No language, no history. She scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed. And yet to her it was absolutely absorbing. All this, the cabs passing. And she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that. Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on.

If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back, like a cat's. Or she purred. Devonshire House, Bath House, the house with the china cockatoo. She'd seen them all lit up once and remembered Sylvia, Fred, Sally Seaton, such hosts of people. And dancing all night, and the wagons plodding past to market, and driving home across the park.

She remembered once throwing a shilling into the serpentine. But everyone remembered. What she loved was this. Here. Now. In front of her. The fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street? Did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her. Did she resent it?

Or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely, but that somehow, in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home, of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was,

Part of people she'd never met, being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist. But it spread ever so far, her life, herself. But what was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchard's shop window? What was she trying to recover?

What image of white dawn in the country, as she read in the book spread open, fear no more the heat of the sun, nor the furious winter's rages. This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears, tears and sorrows, courage and endurance.

a perfectly upright and stoical bearing. Think, for example, of the woman she admired most, Lady Bexborough, opening the bazaar. There were Joriks, jaunts and jollities. There were Soapy Sponge and Mrs. Asquith's memoirs and big game hunting in Nigeria all spread open. Ever so many books there were,

But none that seemed exactly right to take to Evelyn Whitbread in her nursing home. Nothing that would serve to amuse her and make that indescribably dried-up little woman look, as Clarissa came in just for a moment, cordial before they settled down for the usual interminable talk of women's ailments. How much she wanted it.

that people should look pleased as she came in, Clarissa thought, and turned and walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because it was silly to have other reasons for doing things. Much rather would she have been one of those people like Richard, who did things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves, but to make people think this or that.

Perfect idiocy, she knew. Now the policeman held up his hand, for no one was ever for a second taken in. Oh, if she could have had her life over again, she thought, stepping onto the pavement, could have looked even differently. She would have been, in the first place, dark, like Lady Bexborough, with a skin of crumpled leather, beautiful eyes,

She would have been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and stately, rather large, interested in politics, with a country house, very dignified, very sincere. Instead of which, she had a narrow, pea-stick figure, a ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird's. That she held herself well was true.

and had nice hands and feet, and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore. She stopped to look at a Dutch picture. This body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing, nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself, invisible, unseen, unknown, there being no more marrying.

No more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them. Bond Street. This being Mrs. Dalloway. Not even Clarissa anymore. This being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.