As a little kid I hated going to sleep. No matter how much got done during the day it felt like I was surrendering the day by going to sleep. I think a part of me still feels that way. I find myself looking at the clock and calculating how much time I have left in the day before that good night. If I stay up another two hours I'll only get six hours of sleep, but it will be worth it because those two hours are spent awake. Somehow that's a victory against the losing battle we have with daily unconsciousness. In a way it's kind of strange that our bodies can't operate more than a few days without going into low power mode for several hours. We aren't the model for efficiency. While most of us get various amounts of sleep every night, we've all been in situations where we've simply gone without for extended periods of time. The longer we go without the more surreal the world becomes. Eventually no amount of fighting it will stop us from closing our eyes.
There are a lot of theories about what's actually going on when we sleep. The body obviously needs to recharge and does so by essentially paralyzing itself for hours. Our mind also needs rest and yet the brain never really stops working. We dream. What are dreams though? Are they just a random collection of thoughts being endlessly sorted by the mind? Some believe our brain works on thoughts even when we're not aware of it and dreaming is just an extension of that after hours work. That might be true in some cases, but it doesn't always explain the nature of our dreams. Is it possible our minds are operating on another level of consciousness while we're sleeping? If our bodies are paralyzed and our minds are running the show without us then where are we during all this? Everything that we are could be broken down to electrical impulses passing through neural pathways, but what if we're something more than the sum of our parts? What if during those hours that we're sleeping we escape this reality, even if it's only moments at a time? Since we're not really here while this is all happening then it may be possible that we're somewhere else.
If we actually do leave this place for another what's to say that wherever we end up isn't some place we could return to by choice? I've talked about reality before and we've come to assume that all this is the only reality there is. Maybe it is, but what happens to our reality when we're sleeping? We've all had dreams that feel real. Some of these stay with us long after we've woken up. They become as real as any memory. For us they are a memory even if they technically only happened within our mind. Maybe there's no difference as far as our mind is concerned. Whatever we perceive to be real is in fact real for us. So the dreamworld that we create is as real as Zimbabwe. Maybe the dream is more real because we've experienced it, while many of us haven't actually been to Zimbabwe, so that far off place becomes the dream. As I mentioned our bodies aren't the best examples of an efficient machine. We're forced to stop and rest and yet when we do things are still going. So maybe there is something more to our need to sleep. It could be that we sleep not for physical rest like we believe, but rather rest from reality. Is it possible our minds can only operate on this plane of existence for limited times before they're forced to go somewhere else? What if what we think of as reality is really just where our mind takes us to rest from something else? So which is the dream?
