Welcome to Sleep Stories with Steph,
Your go-to podcast that guarantees you a calm and relaxing transition into a great night's sleep.
Today's story is called Dr.
Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde.
First published in 1886,
This story explores the duality of human nature and suggests that within each and every one of us lies both good and evil.
But before we begin,
Let's take a moment to focus on where we are now.
It is time to relax and fully let go.
There is nothing you need to be doing now and nowhere you need to go.
Take a deep breath in through your nose.
Then let it out on a long sigh.
Chapter 10 continued.
I was so far in my reflections when,
As I have said,
A sidelight began to shine upon the subject from the laboratory table.
I began to perceive more deeply than it has ever been stated the trembling immateriality,
The mist-like transience,
Of this seemingly so solid a body in which we walk attired.
Certain agents,
I found,
Have the power to shake and pluck back that fleshly vestment,
Even as a wind might toss the curtains of a pavilion.
For two good reasons,
I will not enter deeply into this scientific branch of my confession.
First,
Because I have been made to learn the doom and burden of our life is bound forever on man's shoulders,
And when the attempt is made to cast it off,
It but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and awful pressure.
Second,
Because,
As my narrative will make,
Alas,
I too evident,
My discoveries were incomplete.
Enough,
Then.
I managed to recognise my natural body for the mere aura,
And managed to compound a drug by which these powers should be dethroned from their supremacy,
And a second form and countenance substituted,
Nonetheless natural to me because they were the expression and bore the stamp of the lower elements in my soul.
I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of practice.
I knew well I risked death,
For any drug that so potently controlled and shook the very fortress of identity might,
By the least scruple of an overdose or at least the inopportunity in the moment of exhibition,
Utterly blot out that immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it to change.
But the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at last overcame the suggestions of alarm.
I had long since prepared my tincture.
I had purchased,
At once,
From a firm of wholesale chemists,
A large quantity of a particular salt which I knew,
From my experiments,
To be the last ingredient required,
And late one accursed night I compounded the elements,
Watched them boil and smoke together in the glass,
And when the ebullition had subsided,
With a strong glow of courage,
I drank off the potion.
The most wracking pang succeeded,
A grinding in the bones,
Deadly nausea and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death.
Then these agonies began swiftly to subside and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness.
There was something strange in my sensations,
Something indescribably new,
And from its very novelty incredibly sweet.
I felt younger,
Lighter,
Happier in body.
Within I was conscious of a heady recklessness,
A current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy,
A solution of the bonds of obligation,
An unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul.
I knew myself at the first breath of this new life to be more wicked,
Tenfold more wicked,
Sold a slave to my original evil.
And the thought in that moment braced and delighted me like wine.
I stretched out my hands,
Exulting in the freshness of these sensations,
And in the act I was suddenly aware that I had lost in stature.
There was no mirror at that date in my room,
That which stands beside me as I write was brought there later on,
And for the very purpose of those transformations.
The night,
However,
Was far gone into the morning.
The morning,
Black as it was,
Was nearly ripe for the conception of the day.
The inmates of my house were locked in the most rigorous hours of slumber,
And I determined and flushed as I was,
With hope and triumph to venture in my new shape as far as to my bedroom.
I crossed the yard wherein the constellations looked down upon me.
I could have thought with wonder the first creature of that sort that their unsleeping vigilant had yet disclosed to them.
I stole through the corridors a stranger in my own house,
And coming to my room I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.
I must speak here by theory alone,
Saying not that which I know,
But that which I suppose to be the most probable.
The evil side of my nature,
To which I had now transferred the stamping efficacy,
Was less robust and less developed than the good which I had just deposed.
Again,
In the course of my life,
Which had been,
After all,
Nine-tenths a life of effort,
Virtue and control,
It had been much less exercised and much less exhausted.
And hence,
As I think,
It came about that Edward Hyde was so much smaller,
Slighter,
And younger than Henry Jekyll.
Even as good shone upon the countenance of the one,
Evil was written broadly and plainly on the face of the other.
Evil besides,
Had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay.
This I still believe to be the lethal side of man.
And yet,
When I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass,
I was conscious of the fact of no repugnance,
Rather of a leap of welcome.
This,
Too,
Was myself.
It seemed natural and human.
In my eyes,
It bore a lively image of the spirit.
It seemed more express and single than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine.
And insofar,
I was doubtless right.
I have observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde,
None could come near to me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh.
This,
As I take it,
Was because all human beings as we meet them are co-mingled out of good and evil.
And Edward Hyde,
Alone in the ranks of mankind,
Was pure evil.
I lingered but a moment at the mirror.
The second and conclusive experiment had yet to be attempted.
It yet remained to be seen if I had lost my identity beyond redemption and must flee before daylight from a house that was no longer mine.
Hurrying back to my cabinet,
I once more prepared and drank the cup,
Once more suffered the pangs of dissolution,
And came to myself once more with a character,
The stature and the face of Henry Jekyll.
That night I had come to the fatal crossroads.
Had I approached my discovery in a more noble spirit,
Had I risked the experiment while under the empire of generous or pious aspirations,
All must have been otherwise.
And from these agonies of death and birth,
I had come forth an angel instead of a fiend.
The drug had no discriminating action.
It was neither diabolical nor divine.
It but shook the doors of the prison house of my disposition.
At that time,
My virtue slumbered.
My evil,
Kept awake by ambition,
Was alert and swift to seize the occasion,
And the thing that projected was Edward Hyde.
Hence,
Although I had now two characters as well as two appearances,
One was wholly evil and the other was still the same old Henry Jekyll,
That incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair.
The movement was thus wholly towards the worse.
And much worse it would get,
As time went on.
