When Oidipous reveals that he has been wandering figuratively in his mind and travelling “many roads” this will remind an audience familiar with Aeschylus’ Oedipus that he killed his father at a crossroads. His mention of wanderings thus recalls a past of which he himself seems unaware, even though it was he who lived it. This again gives the audience occasion to remark both upon the accuracy of his expression and his blindness to its most salient meanings. It may also begin to sense the irony in the fact that where he seems to himself most prescient, he is most ignorant, and when he confesses to ignorance (wandering in his mind), he touches upon the most pertinent of facts. Thus, where he has just told the priest that he was not roused from sleep, the audience might understand that he is even now sleepwalking; he is awake but unseeing, sleeping a sleep from which it seems he cannot be roused. This poses a problem for the audience: if it is an aspect of the sleep of ignorance that one is unaware that one is sleeping, how is it possible for one to be roused from it? Does the play not perhaps prod its audience at this moment towards wakefulness? [Mpe]