Aeneas and the Sibyl are tourists in the underworld. They perceive the different experiences of space and time that the different groups of inhabitants have but they cannot share these experiences. They exist in the spaces of the underworld and beyond. They are both in the temporal zone of the underworld and yet continue to exist on the temporal arch of the physical earthly realm. This is why the Sibyl constantly pushes Aeneas along – for she wants him to complete his journey before nightfall. 

When Aeneas finally leaves the underworld, there is no discontinuity – the earthly realm is just as he left it. The chapter ends, “Aeneas cuts his way to the waiting ships to see his crews again, then sets a course straight on to Caieta’s harbor. Anchors run from prows, the sterns line the shore.” There has been a pause – but a pause more equivalent to some hours of sleep – which are both full and empty – than to a tangential journey or massive importance like the one which Aeneas and the Sibyl have undertaken. Indeed, the frame of the story of the descent into the underworld hints that this journey could be read as a trace or dream. Aeneas spends the entire night before the descent into the underworld participating in rites and ritual sacrifice. The final sacrifice, which opens up the hole into the underworld, occurs only at daybreak: 

Aeneas himself, sword drawn, slaughters a black-fleeced lamb to the Furies’ mother, Night, and to her great sister, Earth, and to you, Proserpina, kills a barren heifer. Then to the king of the river Styx, he raises altars onto the dark night and over their fires lays whole carcasses of bulls and pours fat oil over their entrails flaming up. Then, suddenly, look, at the break of day, first light, the earth groans underfoot and the wooded heights quake and across the gloom the hounds seem to howl at the goddess coming closer.

The timing of this scene (daybreak after a sleepless night) together with the intensity of ritual action contained therein gesture toward understanding the descent into the underworld as a product of ritually induced hallucination or as the product of a dream state brought on by religious ecstasy. Upon coming out of the dream stare – waking up – Aeneas is able to seamlessly (and seemingly without fatigue or being generally discombobulated) pick up where he left off, only now steeled by special knowledge.