Awake, Sleep,Dream

Work could be very taxing , enervating and totally exhausting . Having worked days and nights over the past 5 years , have kind of made it as a practice to be able to have little sleep ands stay awake for long hours at a stretch. The produtivity is probably compromised but i have been able to work the best even during long hours , i guess motivation and interest causes the human mind to overcome any difficulties through endurance and resolve.

Long working hours has strangely made me much more calm, but also has seriously caused damage to my eating habits , one reason and area where my productivity has been severely crippled. Right from my school days night studies had been a practice , the calmness and lonleiness of the nights is something I really love.

Having this seeped into my blood, i also have the bad habit to procrastinate things till night which i could schedule and finish possibly during the day. I still cannot master the art of being aware while dozing off to sleep , it always seems to be instantaneous and momentary. We dont doze off to sleep over a progressional basis is my belief, eventhough we close our eyes , switch off lights, make the room silent , they are only factors which are conducive enough but the actual sleep or transition from awake to sleep is always momentary. Hypnotists also create this conduciveness,but the sudden drop of reality is immediately filled with the mind created world of shapes, colors, people,sound,imaginations and fantasies which we call the dream. I hardly remeber any dream , but the dreams i do remeber are sparked by some events which triggers the deja vu feeling and a faint resemebalance to having dreamt about it or concerning the event/person or thought during the wake state.

I dont get the relaxed feeling eventhough iam awake and close my eyes , and body laid on the bed, mocking sleep . True relaxation is only acheived in sleep and freshness felt only after a true sleep rather than mimicing it. Eventhough mind is put into its own thinking, imagination and thought process, even during sleep there is a relaxation which is not acheived by mimicing the same. I guess the EEG stands a proof on this claim by recording different wave graphs of the mind as alpha, beta etc to shoe the activity of the brain. Mimicing sleep is an effort as compared to effortlessely dreaming.

But over a period of time, by practice i have been able to get up even in deep sleep, on a faint phone ring(only phone rings or door knocks). This was not the earlier case when i used to sleep like a dead python, but this proves it is possible to tune to the outside reality and have a level of sensitivity between the awake and dream worlds, a channel of receptivity and sensitivity to whats happening bridging the two.

I guess mind doest want to be controlled for once, it doesnt want to fight rigorously the consciousness which tiresomes the mind ,one reason why there is less decipation of energy in real sleep as to the mocking sleep. Not that we are not fighting consciousness even during dreams , but the fact remains that the flow of imagination is free, the creation of ambience is purely our choice, the outcome of events is our wish. Even more interesting is the fact that some dreams go beyond a point or a state of threshold, wherein the subject is forced to wake state from a terrible or mightmarish state in the dream. It maybe probably due to the mind causing a physical reaction and the attention being transitioned to the physical and hence pushing the subject to the so called awake state as a consquence. During sleep we are not aware of the body, when we are awake we are all the time aware of the body or the sense of I the body. The transition therefore from sleep to awake state should be a characterization of the feeling iam the body, and for which to happen the brain requires to pay attention to the bodily needs unlike mind focussing only the events durring dream. Since certain events in the dream is got the potential to induce such nightmares which can change the chemical reaction of the body, it naturally paves the way for brains attention resulting in the sudden change of states sleep-dream-awake states.

One aspect of my deep sleeping is the fact that sometimes i dont realise pain as i do when iam awake, there have been times where i used to scratch myself bleeding but not finding any pain whatsoever, mind is distracted to the pain during sleep but at same time mind is distracted also from sleep, and momentarily can focuss itself to the physical need and can go through the cycles of dream-awake vis-a-vis in cycles. This could happen more than once or in frequent intervals too, without a conscious rememberance or memory recording the same or inability to recollect the same.

Ramana pretended himself dead, and what he found was realization. The concept of we are not the body is a difficult thing to rationalize and live by practice in every moment, a profound gifted or blessed experience could make it easier but then are you blessed ? Sometimes the very try can take one away from the goal , because of the delusions created by one's own mind, or the loss of hope or motivation in not having succeeded, or straying away from focus & losing concentration. Sometimes i think we have to wait and leave for things to happen, and only trying to be aware of whats happenign to us all the time, and understanding from the same.

Its interesting we forget a part of ourseleves, as body during sleep and pretend as the so called self in the real seeking freedom for fullfilling the desires during wake states. If at all there needs an investigation to move into the realms of the human mind by science / spirituality or rationally challenging and intriguing aspect of the mind , then it is all about sleep, dreams and our nights, which we live through in experience everyday , just not you or me but the whole human race is going through but unfortunately we have taken it for granted.