Sleeping Toward Morning

I dreamt I slept the day away dreaming.

I understand we spend a third more or less of our lives asleep.  Last night I was thinking about that as I got into bed.  Pulling the covers up to my chin on a cold winter night, how good it feels to get into bed and just lie there all snug and secure, waiting for the night train to dreamland.  Then I realized one can only truly sleep when one feels safe.  My dogs and cats must feel very safe indeed. They can sleep at the drop of a hat.  Whenever the activity comes to a halt, to sleep they go.

Sleep is a journey one takes to places one would never dream of while awake.  I guess that is why they call it sleep.  You can do the most amazing things while asleep: travel to exotic places, even the moon and beyond.  You can talk with the living and the dead and come to understand deep philosophical truths such as "Who is God and does He/She really exist?" and the most mundane facts of life like why someone would put back an empty milk container in the refrigerator.

One thing that stood out in my mind as I was preparing to fall asleep is that even when we are awake, we may still be asleep.  I have been reading some books that talk about being mindfully aware of ourselves and our activities to the point that life becomes a living meditation.  So often I find myself doing things automatically such as when I drive to a place I have been routinely over and over, I find myself suddenly jolted by the fact that I don't remember the trip at all.  The I fear is truly being asleep while awake.

Asleep while in a sleep.  Awake to find I am am still asleep.  The awakening to a wakefulness to find you are still in a sleep asleep.  There's an old song I used to love but haven't heard in a long time.  It won the Oscar in 1969.  That was the year I was a high school senior and playing the role of the melancholy poet.  I felt alive then, just as I am beginning to feel again now.  Thinking deep thoughts, dreaming mystical dreams, that is feeling alive for me.  Here is how that song, "The Windmills of My Mind" ends:

Like a circle in a spiral

Like a wheel within a wheel

Never ending or beginning, 

On an ever spinning wheel

As the images unwind

Like the circles that you find

In the windmills of your mind

So up I get again today to go out into the world and whether this is just a dream or it is reality, well, only the next awakened moment will tell. In the meantime, as Shakespeare once penned, "To sleep perchance to dream...ay, there's the rub."