Awake

I’ve just spent one of those glorious nights where you lie in bed for six hours and no matter how much you toss and turn, the mind simply refuses to let go. It clings to consciousness like a whining child clutches at a forbidden lollipop. It whirls and it swirls with no real logic or form, slipping into the calm of that time right before sleep and then jolting back out with some infuriatingly persistent thought – synapses sputtering and tweaking like light bulbs that flicker before they finally die. Memories and half-baked ideas and thoughts and scraps of dreams swimming over each other in seamless and incomprehensible complexity. Threads tangled in the mind, knots nearly releasing – pulled tight again until finally you find enough willpower to look at the clock on your phone – 3:38, 4:10 – or in my case, listen yet again to the doles of the church bells reminding you every fifteen minutes of yet another failed attempt to count sheep or successfully master deep breathing techniques.

Even stranger than the doddering boredom of lying in the same 8’ by 4’ wooden box for six hours thinking about all your problems – the most pressing of which being the precise fact that you’ve you been lying in an 8’ by 4’ oblong box for 6 hours – is sleep itself. Sleep is weird and that’s all there is to it. Think, last night for instance, of the hoards of bodies stretched out across the world in comatose stupors for hours at a time, like cell phones hooked into chargers, their brains clicking through ideas and fears and obsessions that have festered in the cesspools of the unconscious.  Images and feelings floating on whimsies of the uncontrolled self. Sometimes I think about this when I travel – paying my precious money for the opportunity to self-induce a semi coma.

But what I love about sleep are dreams, scraps of life hidden in our heads, made real. Do you ever dream of a person who you don’t even know very well and then run into them and then you feel as if you know them but you can’t exactly tell them that or they’d think you were some sort of obsessive wacko? But all the while you have this unshakable feeling about them that colours how you see them? Or other times it’s someone you haven’t thought of in ages and ages and then there they are, right in your mind doing things and you thought you barely even remembered that they existed. Or my favourite, when someone you miss or someone who has died is real again just for that strange time-warped stretch of sleep. Or you dream of a fear you didn’t even know you had.

Dreams show us the incredible potential of our minds: they are a fleeting glimpse of the vast chasms of our selves swirling with information we have gathered in each moment of life. All of it, in there somewhere, forming who we are and yet most of it we are completely unaware of. Forgotten memories that are us.  Genius tangled in incomprehensible webs, strangled from expression.