Dreamy Debate

Perhaps it’s the month of idle time to blame
Perhaps it’s all the extra sleep
And then again, maybe it’s just how things are… I seem to obsess over the same things over and over again in almost a cyclic manner.

Dreams, humor, death, religion, time, patterns and design… definitely the strangest combination of interest areas.

This time its back to dreams. And in particular I’m obsessing over the ‘brim’. The crazy time between sleep and wake. The transition time when one is ‘half asleep’. It’s like between two worlds. A world of collective reality (awake) and the world of personal reality ( asleep).

While going to sleep its interesting how one tries to let go and just sleep… the funny feeling of KNOWING that one is drifting into sleep…

And then while waking up, the funny feeling of trying to remember a good dream, and the harder one tries, every last memory of it escapes leaving only a good feeling, but no trace of the reason…

I have often wondered using Darwin’s theory of evolution, what could be the evolutionary reason for dreams… and bad dreams? Is it just an error?... maybe not… dreams are perhaps a means of remaining in a semi-conscious state, keeping the mind alive, so that it is easier to spring to action if needed… the opposite of dreaming is the ‘dead sleep’ which is so much more difficult to snap out of…
The dead sleep. Now, away from the world of wild predators out to get us, a good sleep is meant to be a dead sleep. A complete write off of that time… and amusingly it’s always the people who don’t like ‘wasting time’ that prefer the ‘dead sleep’. Perhaps being completely in control ( after all its ALL your creation) and even so, not in control is a terrible feeling for the busy ‘doers’ of the world!

So are dreams a defense mechanism? A way to rest in way that still allows for an alert mind? If so, then the plot thickens!
So we derive that dreams are a means to attempt at a longer life.
And yet I’ve died so often in my dream, except the amazing bit is that death in a dream ENTAILS waking up. No dream allows for the experience of death… Death is ALWAYS about waking up…
And there again I’m back to religion! So does religion too take cues from dreams? Is this experience of ‘waking up’ upon death in a dream the origin of the concept of ‘afterlife’ or the concept of a ‘nirwana’ ?

SO not only have dreams given us longer lives, they have unwittingly instilled in us a concept of death as an awakening, stretching our existence into eternity!