Waking up

This morning my wife woke me up. I was naked, sitting up on the couch in the livingroom. It was still very very dark. I didn't remember getting there. I sleep naked, so that factor is not that odd. I do wonder, however, if I will find myself in these situations when my children are older, because I don't remember ever finding my dad naked anywhere. He pretty much slept in bed, fully clothed, as far as I knew.

When I got back to the bedroom, it was time to get up for work. I had to turn my alarms off before I went to take a shower. I still feel like this waking up experience is casting ripples across my consciousness. Waking up is important.

Perhaps waking up is the most important thing we do any given day.

Waking up is the only clear boundary between our bodily reality and our dream reality. I know that I don't get fully paralyzed by dopamine in my sleep, frequently blurring the lines between my dream experience and my physical experience. Perhaps some people don't stop dreaming when they wake up.

Perhaps waking up is the biggest mistake we make any given day.

Go ahead and tell me that quantam physics and string theory are not etherial and fanciful dreams: myths. Sure they may be true, accurate, provable, scientific. They are just as real to scientists as demonic posession is to an Orthodox Christian or a Catholic.

When I hit the ground after falling from a building, if only in my head, I feel the impact as my body spasms in reaction. I cry when I drop my 8 month old son and his neck breaks, if only in my dreams. I smile and laugh in my sleep. My wife tells me she loves me in her sleep. It's probably a matter of survival that we have these dividers, like dopamine. You don't want to wander off into the woods with no physical awareness, only to impale yourself on something or fall off of something.

But we have written dream off as false-reality. Just as the atheist has written off God. Just as the Christian has written off Nirvana. Just as the skeptic has written off global warming. Just as the homeless crazy man has written off work, has written off love, has written off sobriety, has written off society, and he, alone now, is real. You frequently hear him refer to the past, when other things were still real, before they all fell apart, before he slipped into his nightmare and lost the ability to wake up.