Sleep

I don't really know what i want to write about tonight. I guess that is something that will fill in as i go, but i am betting it will have something to do with sleep.

The reason for that is, well, i really should be sleeping right now, but for some unknown reason i am not in the slightest tired and as such have no real urge to sleep other than the fact that i should. It really is frustrating, especially when i have to be up at in the science complex for 8:30 in the morning. As i write this, well sit and type this, my clocks are all rolling over to 3 am from 2:59...

God how i wish i was sleeping... Or that tomorrow simply wasn't Tuesday. If it wasn't Tuesday then it wouldn't be my busy day and i could sleep in, or nap, or relax, or something instead of having to run around like a chicken with its head chopped off.

But tomorrow is Tuesday, today really, and it is 3:01 in the morning. So instead i think i will write some more about what is currently escaping me. Sleep, that lovely time between moments of consciousness.

Sleep can be such a wonderful time or something terrifying depending on the events that you have recently gone through. In my favorite book, The Name of The Wind, there is a line about the 4 doors which the mind passes through to deal with pain. They are forgetting, sleep, insanity, and death. I cannot recall which comes first, forgetting or sleep, but they both are very similar that now i wish to write of them both.

In sleep we forget the world around us, we seem to forget the rules of reality favoring a place which holds nothing back, in which there is nothing we cannot do. Sleep is the place where we get to be the authors of our own stories, where literally anything is possible. It is the place of true limitlessness.

And in the same way it is a fiction. Sleep and dreams create nothing more than a false place, a fake home for when someone wakes up it all vanishes. You can hold something in your sleep but it is less substantial than smoke, at least smoke leaves a smell behind.

And yet even though sleep truly offers us nothing real, it is less than a video game or a movie because those can at least be shared experiences, does it not seem to be something more? Something special?

When we lay down to sleep and close our eyes we become defenseless until we wake up again (or depending on the person until 20 minutes after we have woken up...). We sleep next to people we feel truly comfortable with. Sleep comes after a large meal or a truly tiring discussion or work out.

We lay down, wrapped in hopefully warm blankets, close our eyes, and drift away.