Sleep is like a swift train
Plunging into long black tunnels,
Slicing day with red and black light.
No worry about the skeleton engineer.
Head to pillow is like head to track,
Listening to the rumble of destiny,
Knowing that the opening will come.
In sleep, as in the tunnels,
The sound seems ever closer.
When you sleep, some insist that the world as you know it ceases to exist. The world exists because something inside of you asserts that it is so. When awake, are you then no longer dreaming? Or are you just dreaming another dream?
Going to sleep takes letting go. As any insomniac will tell you, it can’t be forced. But we so identify control with waking, is it possible that the uncontrolled aspect of sleep is an equal reality?
Sleep seems so real, and then we awake. Waking life seems so real, and yet we need to let go of it everyday. This strange contrast is one that those who follow Tao contemplate continually. If life is mere shifting from one dream to another, they constantly ask: What is truly real?
It’s at night, when perhaps we should be dreaming, that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull. I don’t know if anyone has ever pointed out that great attraction of insomnia before, but it is so; the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instincts and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind. I wish I believed, as J. B. Priestley did, that consciousness continues after disembodiment or death, not forever, but for a long while. Three score years and ten is such a stingy ration of time, when there is so much time around. Perhaps that’s why some of us are insomniacs; night is so precious that it would be pusillanimous to sleep all through it! A “bad night” is not always a bad thing. — Brian W. Aldiss
“Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
Circadiana is a wonderful blog on sleeping with all kinds of scientific facts and studies on sleep – it has some really interesting stuff.
I think Americans are probably the most sleep-deprived people on the planet, which is a big part of what makes our society so crazy. There is so much going on all the time, we never have enough time to get to all the things we “need” to do, and we end up depriving ourselves of the sleep that we really need. We send our kids to school too early so we can scurry off to work for the day, with many of us not even being really awake until noon or so. By two or three o’clock, we’re exhausted, but the society won’t let us nap like we should, so we bumble through the afternoon til it’s time to go home, and then collapse in front of out TVs for the evening before stumbling off to bed, not realy resting well because of all the day’s events and caffeine. Why this rush for everyone to be at work at the same time, to go home at the same time, to do everything to some made-up imposed time schedule? It’s all just so crazy making.
I enjoy the relative luxury in our society of actually getting enough sleep. When I don’t, I get very cranky. When I really haven’t slept, I’ve gone crazy, quite literally. People with an underlying bipolar disorder tend to do that. So I know how important sleep is. For me sleep is a crucial thing. And yes, my dreams can seem very real to me when I’m having them. But I find the waking reality to be far more real to me – except when I went mad for a few days….
When you’re crazy, it’s rather like being asleep while you’re awake – your mind starts making the same kind of connections you do while you’re dreaming, where things make sense even though when you think about them when you wake up they are totally ridiculous. That’s why crazy people say crazy things – their minds are making those strange connections and the connections actually feel “true” to the person experiencing them. It’s rather fascinating, really. It’s led me to study a lot more about how the mind and consciousness works – right now I’m reading Antonio Damasio’s
“The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness” . My own suspicion is that if you looked at how the neurons are firing in a bipolar disorder episode, they would look very much like most people’s do when they are dreaming. I think bipolar disorder is about brain chemistry gone wrong and causing misfiring in the brain, probably often due to lack of real, restful sleep.
It was a unique experience, for me, thank goodness, but I finally got to understand the reality of my sister’s and nephew’s everyday life, and know how difficult things really are for them. The waking dream experience is not an unpleasant one, but I doubt most people would really be able to handle experiencing it. Perhaps that’s why the fear of drugs is so prevalent in our society. We fear not being in control of events – and yet, how much control do we really have, if we let our lives be dictated by clocks and schedules and what we think we “should” have in our lives? Perhaps those who follow the Tao understand more that true control of your own life is so tremendously more valuable than having more stuff, or a shinier car or bigger house. When Americans become sane someday, if ever, they might come to better understand this.
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