On Sleeping

I have been experiencing occasional sleeplessness and have not been able to fall asleep until three or four in the morning no matter how tired I am. So great and powerful is the invention of sleeping pills, they have become my salvation army over the past two weeks.

If the paradox of sleeping always fascinates me, it is perhaps because it offers a wholly different form of pleasure. The pleasure we derive from sleeping is far removed from the pleasures we derive from our secular desires. It depends not on the firing of neurons between the sensory cells under our skin, but on the absence of consciousness and the presence of dreams. Little wonder insomnia is our worst nightmare.

Night after night, we lose interest in being conscious and endeavour at our best to put our minds at ease. The scene of Fight Club strikes us as familiar that Jack (Edward Norton) suffers insomnia and narcolepsy simultaneously which he eventually has to open himself up in pathetic cancer groups, something stronger which he can latch onto, so he can sleep like a baby. If we so dislike being awake, it may be because the horrors of the nightmares are better than the reality which haunts us like a vast ocean of anguish. Our hatred of consciousness is also worthy of our sad suspicion because it suggests that it is something invented to make up for our lack of courage to deal with sorrows and anxieties which we encounter at work and therefore falsely raised to a status superior to consciousness itself. It is just a terrible excuse of our reluctance to bravely confront the cruel reality.

The British philosopher Mark Vernon confirms my point. He invites us to the story which Freud tells in "The Interpretation of Dreams":

"..., he tells the story of a father whose son has died. While asleep one night, he dreams that his son is standing by his bed mouthing haunting words: 'Father, can't you see that I am burning?' The father awakes. He smells real burning. Horrified, he realises that a candle has fallen on the shroud covering his son's corpse and it is on fire."

According to Freud's theory, Vernon believes that dreaming exists to keep us asleep. The father only woke up to put out the fire on the corpse in the stage where unconsciousness was impossible. I am no stranger to this theory. I once dreamed of a couple of men opening fire at me. Only when I woke up, I found out the weather was too jealous of me so comfortably lying in my bed, therefore rather than letting my alarm clock go off, it decided to pull me back into reality by throwing a tantrum at me with a thunderstorm. This experience of mine suggested even a few wounds by gun shots in a dream were more pleasant that being woken up by the power of nature.

Is sleeping so desirable that we should habitually perform it once a day? Do we really dream our worries away during our sleep? If you are familiar with philosophy, you should not find countless stories about Socrates meditating until early in the morning strange. There are so many confusions and ambiguities in life. Dealing with life like the complexity of a spider web, it is often better to just let our worries bury deep down into our unconsciousness during our sleep. But Socrates was not satisfied. There was obviously something which troubled him so much which he had to clarify the blurry distinctions of truth and falsehood. Rather than letting us become men who were deprived of the great virtue, he urged us to investigate our worries and attempt to solve them.

What does this tell us? Our desire to sleep is not so much related to our physical health, but rather our mental health. Driven by the financial necessity of the modern world, our days are dense with meetings and projects. There is hardly any leisure not because we work harder, but but because our leisure is as strenuous as our work. Motivated by the obsession with fame and power, employers strive hard to exploit the best of us to bring out the worst of them. Our busy days are filled with such futilities which do not allow us to have time for slow thought out of which wisdom is distilled. We only wish every night to put our minds at rest by dreaming even if dreams transform into nightmares. But our sleeplessness suggests that some worries are not allowed to be put away just by a shrug of the shoulder. They are destined to be solved by our rational minds. Sleeplessness keeps us from being ordinary. It keeps us from being satisfied with a timid soul. It perhaps at times reminds us of the fact that we may be great thinkers. After all, we need sleeplessness in order to fall asleep. Just a thought.

W