n nights. The point is that eternal life is eternity without rest. Look there! The man, the youth, who wanted eternal life! Sleep, like a fog, blew over him. The relationship between sleep and wakefulness is here seen as a microcosm for death and life. Gilgamesh moans, In my bedroom Death dwells. Utanapishtim speculates, How alike are the sleeping and the dead. The image of death cannot be depicted. What is meant is that the nature of the afterlife cannot be described, just as the true nature of a dream cannot be described. Whenever we relate dreams to each other, we have the sensation that we are making it up even though we describe it as faithfully as possible, because we are necessarily translating the dream into the language of waking reality. So Gilgamesh must come to understand that the thing he wants to know is ultimately unknowable. ...
