The Way of Drowsy

the way of drowsy:

how sleep first happened, let's examine that, so a lot to think about the first day, many questions, so we can conclude drowsiness led from mental exhaustion, originally. people who think a lot, who really push, fall asleep in a snap moment.

now a lot of people are into physical exercise, they find that works too, a slow slide to sleep.

traditionally, dinner was most important, from dusk into the early hours of the night, and it was huge compared to breakfast and lunch. after dinner, rather faint, stagger to bed, finding a position, and to sleep.

these ways kill the wide awake state.

what is being asleep? in my experience, cloudy vague thoughts, lucidity gone, and a reset in sensation or feeling.

CLEARCHARGE

To Think Awake and Asleep

to think awake and asleep:

we have few words as signifiers for the various states of what is perhaps the most important component of our minds, our consciousness and its cycle of change. for something that is complex, that could be considered to have many different states, we commonly reduce this to two words, "awake" and "asleep", or "conscious" and "unconscious". is it really that simple? or is this a prime example of the poverty of the language in its current form?

let us deconstruct the situation. when we are awake we are self consciously thinking, our thoughts are clearer, and so the word "think" is linked to the word "consciousness". now i seek to dismiss the most common false assumption which springs from this, that when we are asleep or unconscious we are not thinking at all, that consciousness equates to thinking and unconsciousness to no thinking, like a dead animal in our sleep, so to speak. indeed, i posit that we are thinking all the time, that a fundamental part of the self is the eternal thinker, that we can never stop thinking, even in our sleep.

however, the quality, so to speak, of what our thought is when we are asleep may be very different. words that you would associate with thinking whilst awake are "clear", "focused", "distinct", "conceptual". words that you would associate with thinking whilst asleep or unconscious might be "blurry", "cloudy", "thematic", "moody", "emotional", "stuck", etc. generally, thinking when awake could be slow or fast. when asleep without dreaming, it seems slow. thought is most volatile upon falling asleep and waking up and when dreaming.

you would think, at the very least, this subject deserves a greater, more precise vocabulary, to eliminate the misconceptions arising from the over simplistic present binary terms, "awake" and "asleep".

CLEARCHARGE

The Passive Dreamer to Earth

the passive dreamer to earth:

it is the passive mental state that exists that marks a person as asleep or dreaming. in the early stages of sleep, before consciousness has passed fully, thoughts become less clear, less "logical", and more "random". in sleep, a stream of fact-like thoughts present. often, when they refer to waking life and people we know, they are false, but the sleeper is susceptible to believing them. the sleeper passively accepts these thoughts. they form the "rules" of the dream world.

as i have posited before, earth is a derivative of the dream world, formed from the collective unconscious, the destination after being asleep for something like four days and propelled through a long series of dreams, progressively more and more like waking life, until you wake up in the meta dream that is life on earth. even though waking life on earth feels and seems real, it is still part of the dream world. if we were paranoid, we would be convinced Descartes' malicious demon had created dream world earth and hauled us there to lie to us and imprison us in a false world. however, we must accept that false thoughts and in extension false manifestations of these thoughts naturally occur and to blame agency where there is none is perhaps the case here.

but why is the sleeper or dreamer so passive? when we are awake, we constantly question or critically review our thinking, asleep we often do not. we could characterize the sleeper or dreamer as a docile, somewhat gullible, trusting, childlike person, quite unlike the more sophisticated, cynical, jaded person awake. who amongst us would have truly chosen to awake upon earth and who wouldn't have but are still here anyway?

CLEARCHARGE

The Start of Time and Sleep

the start of time and sleep:

"was there a start of time? and if there wasn't a start of time, what does that mean? that there was always something that happened before any time? it's mind boggling."

"well, if there were an infinite time before now, you'd think we'd be more advanced, right? but what do we mean by the start of time? in the sense that nothing came before the start in the way that time progresses now with something happening before each moment? i can see that in one sense it really doesn't matter as everything that has time is always changing and probably repeating itself, so what difference does marking the start of time make? maybe it's an interesting footnote, you know, like a flag, but nothing more."

"no, it's definitely more than that. doesn't it bug you? also, if there were a start of time, it naturally follows thinking there might be an end of time."

"it's a little paranoid. and it does bug me too. first you're afraid, right, that there was no start of time, that we're already infinitely old, yet we can't remember anything, and next, if there were a start of time, that just brings up the question of the end of time, but thankfully i don't think it necessarily logically follows."

"OK, so there could be a start of time but no end?"

"right. and maybe, you know, it's not even the right question. maybe the question is, is change, or the number of states something can have over all time, is that infinite or finite? i mean there are other questions apart from whether there was a start of time or not."

"so it's like looking at time as a set of different states and it sort of goes back and forth? so if i had a bag of say five different marbles, each marble represents a different state, and obviously there are only five states, that represents all time for the marble in general."

"right. so one of the marbles is the state at the start of time and as general universal time progresses it becomes that marble again and again, perhaps."

"like to touch home base again. so if say we were at the start of time, were we awake or were we asleep?"

"i think we were mostly awake, as we are awake most of the time, right? but i think it could have been somewhere in the middle, when we are wide awake nowadays, that's an extreme position, and likewise, when we're deeply asleep, that's another extreme position, we were born somewhere in between."

"it's just i can't remember what happened even a few minutes ago sometimes or what i was thinking, let alone what happened at the start of time!"

"no, some things can change in an instant, sometimes there is no gradual in between. maybe change is discrete, not continuous."

"what do you really think? was there a start of time?"

"i do think, yes, there was a start of time. anyway, it's easier to think about."

"the realness of progress does suggest to me there was a start of time, i guess. do you think the truth is easier to think about? how awake do you think you were born?"

"i guess fairly awake but more like in a dream. you know, maybe the wide awake stable world is something that came later. i mean, maybe it's not original."

"some people are afraid to go to sleep, and i guess some people are afraid of staying awake too long. maybe you're right, the wide awake world is not that natural because it's different from the beginning but it seems the most real sometimes."

"awake, asleep, dreaming, it's all real. the problem is you forget what happens when you're asleep so it only seems less real."

"what we were talking about before, it's faster. dreams seem to last for hours but are really only minutes long, that kind of thing. it's shocking how easily you forget what happens in your dreams."

"it's like a balancing act. sleep is seen as the solution to being awake too long, but i guess likewise being awake may be the solution to being asleep for so long. both reset things."

CLEARCHARGE

The Voyage of Sleep

the voyage of sleep:

"...so at one point i used to think that sleep was kind of like being dead, but that wasn't very satisfactory, in that you don't really know what death is, right? all the time you're alive, being dead is just some vague as yet undefined state of being, or not being, like nobody knows what death is while they are alive, right?"

"i used to think that when you are fast asleep, you're just not thinking, so you don't remember anything when you wake up."

"right. so sleep, and in extension, death, seems like an absence of thought. i mean the word "consciousness" is used, but like all words, i mean, if words and thought were like food, a particular word has its own unique flavour, right? all the words that mean the same thing, all the synonyms, might be like one type of food, like ice cream, but ice cream comes in all these different flavours, and so do words. for me, the word "consciousness" seems to suggest something mystical and fragile and fleeting, but it means the same thing as the phrase "thought in your head", right?"

"how about head think?"

"yeah. so words have different connotations. but the most commonly used words might not be the best or the simplest words. sometimes it seems the oddest words get promoted the most. it's like the most popular sandwich was banana with mustard and cucumber on raisin bread! but i digress..."

"you were talking about sleep and consciousness."

"again the word "consciousness" just makes it seem like it could go at any moment, like it was a flickering candle flame or something, and you know any minute something could come along and put it out. you know, maybe it's just the wrong word."

"right, but we are stuck with it, don't you think? as much as you'd like to, you can't change the vocabulary. anyway, i don't believe that you're not thinking whilst you're asleep anymore. i wanted to try to, you know, like observe myself as i was falling asleep, and remember what was happening."

"monitor yourself, like thinking about what was going on while you were falling asleep?"

"exactly. and a few times as i was falling asleep, i forced myself awake, you know, sat up suddenly so i could think about what i was thinking just before. and it's like, as you are falling asleep, everything in your mind becomes cloudy and violent, in that your thoughts change really fast, and they don't make much sense. you certainly couldn't easily explain in language what you were thinking about clearly. and then, yesterday, i had been drinking coffee, and i woke up further along the sleep cycle, i think actually just fallen completely asleep and then suddenly awake and i realized, you are completely thinking all the time you are asleep, that you stop thinking is a complete lie."

"i know but what you are thinking, or the quality of your thinking, if thoughts could be conceived of as like a matter substance like a diamond, are completely different to what they are when you are awake. it's like the mind switches to another substance."

"yeah, so my head could be like a giant crystal glass marble, but it's a magical marble and keeps changing inside."

"yes. during consciousness, it's say more or less clear and slow swirls and waves happening inside but as you fall asleep, the marble clouds over like you're saying and it's almost getting violent inside, everything is moving and twisting and turning so fast. that's probably why most of the time you can't remember what happens at this stage."

"yes, it's ironic. sleep seems slow and peaceful but what is really happening in the first stage is completely not."

CLEARCHARGE

Awake, Asleep and the Cycle of Thought

awake, asleep and the cycle of thought:

there is an interesting universal question, that is, was i born awake or was i born asleep? i mean, really? let us explore what we mean by these two words, awake and asleep.

awake, conscious, seeing light and hearing, thinking about the world around us. asleep, though the lights are off so to speak, this does not mean that our thoughts have died, and our thinking ceases to exist, only that it has become more abstract, less to do with the very real senses of sight and hearing.

well, why can't we remember what we dream of, and what we were thinking of before we fell asleep? when sleep fades in, our thinking becomes blurry, less controlled by what we see when awake, and it is an often wild, volatile sequence of thoughts, unto the state of being dead asleep, that we experience daily.

what is typical in the states of being awake and being asleep, probably exist simultaneously all the time. in a sense, we are never "100% awake and 0% asleep" or "0% awake and 100% asleep", at any time. which leads to a refining of the first question, well, how awake was i, at true birth, and how asleep?

dreams are a strange mixture of the two, a fluid state that is similar to the stage of falling asleep, in that thoughts are often abstract, for we cannot easily define what we are thinking about.

is this an important question, the nature of our minds at birth?

CLEARCHARGE

Stages in Sleep

stages in sleep:

first of all, thoughts begin to drift, the analytical mind begins to dissolve, currents flow back and forth.

second of all, a rhythmic flow pattern electronic happens. it is often a repeat cycle which explains why sleep most often seems a short time.

arousal from sleep occurs, thoughts become clearer....

you wake up.

CLEARCHARGE