On Sleep

Never make a speculation about the unconscious….As I see it, however, when I wake up in the morning, I can’t help but feel and imagine the gulf of darkness from which I came.  And a few layers of dreams flicker like films, but then vacuumed up, as I open my eyes.  From where the dreams came is where they go.

Conscious as I may be during the day, the unconscious sort of lingers, I think.  It tells me I’m there, breathing in the living world, but that the bear or chimpanzee in me will have to zero that There-ness for hours when I sleep.  While twilight might steal the day, and night steals twilight, sleep will pilfer much of the night, on those nights I sleep.

Life, I think, is a general fog between memories of days and scant dreams.  I, for one, do not remember dreams or have lucid dreams, hence the dark eruption from sleep to awakening.  I see it now.  I would show you with my hands this eruption, parabolic almost, tornado-image-like—this unconsciousness to awakening.  And though it is darkness, a thousand images are conjured in surreal just at the moment of awakening.

This is not new.  People throw acronyms around like REM.  But I must contemplate, do dreams I forget happen right before I wake or all through the night?  Others say they have lucid dreams, in which they control all that is in the dreams.  That has happened to me with one dream, the dream of flying.  I won’t detail it, but I will say, it was lucid and vivid.

I actually dream best with heavy doses of caffeine, even though when I wake, I reach out for the fleeting dreams.  And, of course, alcohol will make dreams nothing short of passing out till the morning.

A good night’s rest—into the unconsciousness—is I feel sucking the marrow of ancestral bones, and whatever the dreams may be, whatever flickers in the mind’s eye, darkness is around and within, and will one day, possibly, be all.