Piers Plowman 3-5

      The king and his knyghtes to the cherche wente
      To here matynes and masse, and to mete after.

      Then waked I of my wynkyng, and wo was withalle
      That I ne hadde sclepte sadder and yseye more.
      Ere I hadden fare a furlong fantasye me hadde

     That I ne myghthe ferther a fot, for defaute of slepyng.
     I sat softely adoun, and sayde my byleve,
     And so I babled on my bedes thei broughthe me on
     slepe. (5.1-8)



So yah, that happened. When I first read over this I thought this was some extension of the dream. It took me a second to realize that our narrator actually woke up.

This was pretty crazy, being that we have spent the whole time so following this guy through his weird dream. Now he wakes up into a world where people are hopefully people and not the embodiment of ideas.

One thing about the passage, and the whole poem is the excessive alliteration. I would say that it serves as emphasis, but it does not. It is simply poetic and serves to make the whole poem sound like it is read by a fool with a lyre at a renaissance fair.

"Ere I hadden fare a furlong fantasye me hadde That I ne myghthe ferther a fot, for defaute of slepyng."

Our narrator had downed too much medieval NyQuil and drifted into a long fantasy dream that we know today as "Inside Out". He was very tired, and (for the sake of the story) he is still tired and will soon collapse back into slumber. Our author just wanted to pull a quick Christopher Nolan on us, pulling us out of the action only to thrust us back in- quick reality check. Maybe to assert some credibility? That this whole work is total nonsense.

Ultimately, this section was anomalous from what we had previously read, and thus fascinating. I wonder if we will be jumping in and out of sleep again in the near future.