A sample of the awakenings to come . . . 

I had a variety of concerns and exercises about my soul from my childhood; but had two more remarkable seasons of awakening, before I met with that change by which I was brought to those new dispositions, and that new sense of things, that I have since had. The first time was when I was a boy, some years before I went to college, at a time of remarkable awakening in my father's congregation. I was then very much affected for many months, and concerned about the things of religion, and my soul's salvation; and was abundant in duties.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), "Personal Narrative" (1765)

Often, awakening suddenly after midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away.  

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), "Young Goodman Brown" (1835

The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep

Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1864), Walden (1854)

The more I thought over my procedure, the more I was charmed with it. Nevertheless, next morning, upon awakening, I had my doubts,—I had somehow slept off the fumes of vanity. One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the morning.

Herman Melville (1819 - 1891), "Bartleby the Scrivener" (1856)

There is that in me--I do not know what it is--but I know it is in me.
Wrench'd and sweaty--calm and cool then my body becomes,
I sleep--I sleep long.
I do not know it--it is without name--it is a word unsaid,
It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.
Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,
To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.

Walt Whitman, (1819 - 1892) "Song of Myself" (1855)

. . . this terrible question which men here have gone mad and died trying to answer. I dare not put this secret into words. I told you it was dumb. These men, going by with drunken faces and brains full of unawakened power, do not ask it of Society or of God. Their lives ask it; their deaths ask it. There is no reply. I will tell you plainly that I have a great hope; and I bring it to you to be tested.

Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910), "Life in the Iron Mills" (1861)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892)

For the first time she recognized anew the symptoms of infatuation which she had felt incipiently as a child, as a girl in her earliest teens, and later as a young woman. The recognition did not lessen the reality, the poignancy of the revelation by any suggestion or promise of instability. The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant; was hers, to torture her as it was doing then with the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had held, that she had been denied that which her impassioned, newly awakened being demanded.

Chopin, Kate (1851–1904), The Awakening (1899)

Southern land was awakening as from some wild dream to poverty and social revolution . . . . Some day the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of ten million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living—Liberty, Justice, and Right—is marked "For White People Only."

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

     One morning after he had been home about a month his mother came into his bedroom and sat on the bed.  She smoothed her apron.
    "I had a talk with your father last night, Harold," she said, "and he is willing for you to take the car out in the evenings." 
    "Yeah?" said Krebs, who was not fully awake. "Take the car out? Yeah?"
    "Yes. Your father has felt for some time that you should be able to take the car out in the evenings whenever you wished but we only talked about it over last night."

Ernest Hemingway ((1899-1961), "Soldier's Home" (1925)

 I am waking up--
. . . .
The signs are interior.
I'm planning to change . . . . I'm right at the point of committing myself to a future that doesn't include the warehouse and Mr. Mendoza or even a nightschool course in public speaking. 

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), The Glass Menagerie (1944)

photography, lousy photography, electro-fever treatment, internal douche treatment, ultra-violet treatment, elocution lessons, psychic readings, institutes of religion, astrological demonstrations, hands read, feet manicured, elbows massaged, faces lifted, warts removed, fat reduced, insteps raised, corsets fitted, busts vibrated, corns removed, hair dyed, glasses fitted, soda jerked, hangovers cured, headaches driven away, flatulence dissipated, limousines rented, the future made clear, the war made comprehensible, octane made higher and butane lower, drive in and get indigestion, flush the kidneys, get a cheap car-wash, stay-awake pills and go-to-sleep pills, Chinese herbs are very good for you and without a Coca-Cola life is unthinkable.

Henry Miller (1891–1980), The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, "Soirée in Hollywood" (1945)

. . . not the way someone like June would suppose but sweet, gentle, the way it was in the movies and promised in songs; and when she opened her eyes she hardly knew where she was, the back yard ran off into weeds and a fence-like line of trees and behind it the sky was perfectly blue and still.  The asbestos "ranch house" that was now three years old startled her--it looked small.  She shook her head as if to get awake. 

Joyce Carol Oates (b.1938), "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" (1974)

Success is somebody else’s failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World (1989)

The challenge in the old world, the nineties world of Bill Clinton, was to remember that, behind the prosperity and complacency, death was waiting and entire countries hated us.  The problem of the new world, the zeroes world of George Bush, will be to reassert the ordinary the trivial, and even the ridiculous in the face of instability and dread:  to mourn the dead and then try to awaken to our small humanities and our pleasurable daily nothing-much.

Jonathan Franzen, The New Yorker, Sept. 24, 2001