Dream and Let Dream

"If sleep be the cousin of death, than every time I blink's one step closer to my last breath."
- George Quibuyen

"'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished; to die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream..."
- William Shakespeare



The blurring between what is sleep and what is dying provides the space necessary to set a blank slate for building. It is in this space that, when considering Hamlet's famous "To Be or Not To Be" soliloquy, reality is transcended and remedies to life's imperfections are to be hunted and discovered: "For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come when we have shuffled off that mortal coil, must give us pause: there's the respect that makes calamity of so long life..."

Sleep is then the prolongation of this "pause" cited by Shakespeare. It is within sleep that we are able to dig ideas out of the intangible ground. But it is also not to be indulged, just as reaping the harvest from one's plot of land without consideration of others' needs should not be indulged neither. It is where we are all trying to be in the hurry and scurry of our everyday lives: we want to sleep, pause, and cast our nets out into what we know as that mysterious deep, if nothing else then to release from obligations imposed on us by our culture.

Yet it should also be considered that it is within the realm of sleep that culture is created. When remembered by a dreamer, dreams materialize within a number of cultural representations. When a collective culture starts driving its members to sleep, it shall find itself at the mercy of the true dreamers: those who eagerly bring back the pieces from their beloved sleep.





The "application [awake]" mode and "collection [dream]" modes of human existence might best be articulated and symbolized with the aide of a tree. Just as a networking of branches and twigs above the ground reach for the sun, so does a network of roots plunge into the depth of the soil. This is how I think conscious and unconscious modes of being operate in everyday life, as elucidated by the removal of the ground. If one considers the appearance of a healthy tree without ground, he would see an object that is composed of duality, where each side appears equivalent and dependent on the other.

One should consider a payment of appreciation for being allowed a peaceful sleep by those around him. The "loafer" and the "dreamer" are each of the same action, but of a different philosophical approach to sleeping. The loafer indulges his desire to escape his waking obligations via lethargy, while the dreamer is synonymous with an unconscious thinker.





Death is then the permanent sleep, where life is the root system. The awake state is thus made the operations of the "other side," or that place that is unknown. While a sound description of this becomes other-worldly and shamanistic, it is another way to think about natural occurrences and can facilitate meditations on the unchanging laws of nature within the uncertainties of human culture, which is constantly in motion.