Do not act and speak like sleepers
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οὐ δεῖ ὥσπερ καθεύδοντας ποιεῖν καὶ λέγειν. καὶ γὰρ τότε δοκοῦμεν ποιεῖν καὶ λέγειν
We ought not to act and speak like men asleep — for even then, too, we suppose we are acting and speaking.
Preserved by Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 4.46), closing his short Heraclitean series. The warning: one must not act and speak like people asleep — for even in sleep we suppose we are really acting and speaking.
Sleepers do things in dreams — they walk, argue, build — and while dreaming take all of it for real. Heraclitus's warning is that ordinary waking life can be exactly this: acting and speaking on private, disconnected impulse while fully convinced it is genuine action and genuine speech. 'Even then' — even asleep — 'we suppose we are doing and saying'; the supposing is no guarantee. The dreamer's certainty and the fool's certainty are the same certainty.
Waking, for Heraclitus, is not opening your eyes but attending to what is common (B89: the waking share one world; sleepers each turn aside into a private one). To act and speak awake is to answer to the shared <em>logos</em> rather than to the closed circuit of one's own impressions. The fragment is a demand disguised as an observation: stop sleepwalking through your own life, mistaking the private dream for the public world.
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