Poets and philosophers have imagined childhood as an awakening from the sleep before life, or the sleep between lives.
Some see it as a transitional phase between the sleep of non-existence and the waking sleep of modern life.
I love the way William Wordsworth put it:
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.”
