dreams

It doesn't matter what time I go to sleep; somehow I have turned into a person who always wakes up at 7:47 am.

Recent events and a massive shift in worldview have forced me to look at sleep in a new way. It is work. In fact, there is really no such thing as "play" in the traditional sense. Even play is work.

In physics, a force is said to do work when it acts on a body, and there is a displacement of the point of application in the direction of the force. Wikipedia

Based on this definition, sleepy-times are a good opportunity for certain forces to displace/apply/point-in-a-new-direction our consciousnesses as well as our bodies. Those forces may come from within ourselves (and I think they sometimes come from without), but they certainly come. Sleep is not a vacation. At least, not for me anymore.

Because sleep is work, the question becomes, "What kind of work is being done?" Well, of course, there's the work of rebuilding your body and recharging your brain. But there's something else happening on a more "spiritual/consciousness" level. Dreams. Lately, I am terrified of the work on this dream level. Sometimes it is just your brain making sense of the day you just had, but often it is the work of your subconscious in revealing to you what you truly think, what you truly want, and where you're actually headed in life.

The fact that your subconscious hands you this information dressed up in pretty packages with so many bells and whistles is both delightful and pathetic. If you had enough courage and self-awareness about your life, you wouldn't necessarily need these dreams. You wouldn't need a coded, symbolic message to tell you - ever so gently, when you finally "have eyes to see" - that, for example, you secretly feel trapped by your job, or that deep down you know you love someone who doesn't love you back, or that if you stay on your present course, you're going to end up with a ton of accolades from your peers, but in an empty, decaying house.

I enjoy many of my dreams, certainly, but what does it say about me that I sometimes can't bear to look at scary realities in my conscious life? I wish I was more courageous, but until then I guess I'm just going to have to keep dreaming.