Let's wake up to what happens during our sleep

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Our brain, our heart, and our breathing work 24/7. They may slow down during our sleep but they never stop completely. Sometimes, they work even better than when we are awake. We can go to bed with a problem and wake up with a solution. Our brain, while we sleep, is like a black box. We know the input and the output, but we don’t have access to what happens inside the box.

 

We need to know more about it.

Sleeping is more than a period of reduced activity - to the contrary. Sleep deficiency can lead to heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke, obesity, and depression. Sleeping is an essential part of our life, too often neglected. The reason is simple: we are not conscious during our sleep. What we know is that our brain does not receive any information from our material world. It is free to escape the 5% of our cave and explore the 95% of the immatériel world.

 

Fortunately, there are two periods of transition between being asleep and being awake. Before falling asleep is a period called Hypnagogia. Before waking up, it is Hypnopompia. It is through those two periods of transition that we can try to investigate what happens during one third of our life.

 

There is a possibility to develop those states and enjoy periods where we can have, at the same time, the resources available in our sleep and the memory of what happens. If you wake up in the middle of those two periods, you can recall bright ideas that seem to come from another world.

 

This is not a new invention. Carl Jung had a Red Book filled with fragmented insight. Salvador Dali used a “slumber with a key.” He would nap holding a key, and when the key fell from his hand, he would wake up and make a note of the images that came from his subconscious. Thomas Edison was using metal balls for the same purpose. Leonardo da Vinci filled thousands of pages with disconnected sketches and ideas that he later assembled to create new concepts. The same idea was also used by Einstein, Richard Wagner, and Beethoven.

 

Don’t expect poetry. Not even literature. What you get are scattered ideas, symbols, flashes, and concepts. You may get pieces of a puzzle that do not fit together. Keep trying. The more pieces of the puzzle you acquire, the greater the chances are that some will fit together.

 

Don’t rely on your memory. Those ideas can be forgotten as quickly as you forget your dreams. Make a note of it, even if you must get up in the middle of the night. (A little masochism would help.)

 

With practice, ideas will come more often. What started as a trickle will become a flood. New ideas will also emerge during the day. The wall that separates night from day will become less opaque. Those messages come like mail in your mailbox. You must empty this mailbox daily to prevent the flow from stopping. 

 

Puberty of the soul

The child continues to develop his body gradually until he undergoes a sudden change. A day comes when everything is the same, but everything looks different. He has reached puberty.

Something similar can happen to the soul. It’s something like a massive dose of maturity. A day comes when we move from a child’s soul to an adult’s soul and get access to a higher level of consciousness. You have reached a puberty of the soul.

All that may sound like pure utopia. This is what our ancestors must have thought about using fire and what our grandparents said about landing on the moon.

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