Sleep, Perchance to Dream

To live, perchance to sleep?

:yawn:

Quoting schopenhauer1

We should all strive to sleep as much as possible.

Yes, this is the absolute truth. Sleep is my favorite activity or rather inactivity. I get to relinquish any form of agency, in a safe and controlled manner.

Sleep anytime you can.

A lot of the time, consciousness is simply waiting. Enduring. Since we can't just turn ourselves off.

Consciousness is an ever-vigilant insomnia. There can be a certain nobility to it.

But yeah, no, staring up at the ceiling for three hours every night trying to fall asleep is no bueno.

Sleeplessness is nature's way of helping us relive every unfortunate moment we ever had.

Narcolepsy, anyone?

Many thanks are given by me every night to the Greek gods Hypnos (sleep) and his son Morpheus (dreams) for the existence of supplemental melatonin. Without which I was slowly and helplessly driving toward the zip code of Hypnos’s less humorous brother, Thanatos ( :death: ). I felt somewhat like Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club, minus the excitement, drama, and cool soundtrack. Just the water torture of energy-leaking, soul-crunching insomnia. Even real life seemed like a copy of a copy of a copy...

Besides the sleep issue though, I have long felt both the attraction AND the repulsion to pure, unfiltered awareness (for lack of a better description). In an attempt to know and to see, I have at times headed full-blast towards the light of consciousness. Like some kind of misguided astronaut trying to land a rocket on the surface of the sun. Not surprisingly, the rebound effect was a desire for darkness, quiet, and unconsciousness. Then back to more “moth to the flame” adventures. It took some blind guessing to find the “off button” for all this ping-ponging of the psyche.

To an observer, it is probably obvious that the extreme edges are not the goals. (Er... unless you’re playing football). And that no one permanently lives on the summit of Mt. Everest. That more is not often better. That the Buddha’s Middle Path is an extremely helpful template. “Slow and steady wins the race”, says Aesop’s Tortoise. (Which sounds like heresy in our Internet Age. Or should I say “hare-esy”? :blush:

Now, when faced with a problem, I don’t try to solve it. Rather, the goal now is to “dissolve” it. Disintegrating the problem by surrounding it and immersing it in strong liquid, so to speak. And ever so slowly digesting it, after much chewing. Even a snake that swallows its furry food whole relies on its stomach acid to avoid a very bad case of constipation! (Of course, the words “solve” and “dissolve” have the same root meaning. However, the current connotations of both are much more specific and farther apart in meaning).

So... When pondering the problems of daily life or even the eternal metaphysical questions... Consider not looking for solutions. Instead, be the dis-solution. Because having a constipated boa constrictor stuck in the middle of the road helps absolutely no one.

Quoting Posty McPostface

Yes, this is the absolute truth. Sleep is my favorite activity or rather inactivity. I get to relinquish any form of agency, in a safe and controlled manner.

Sleep anytime you can.

What does it say when sleep is preferred more than awake?

Quoting darthbarracuda

A lot of the time, consciousness is simply waiting. Enduring. Since we can't just turn ourselves off.

Consciousness is an ever-vigilant insomnia

An ever-vigilant entropic force which we are trying to keep at bay with ordering our lives, decisions, and maintaining social institutions.. But for what?

Sleep is only the reprieve- a tiny escape. We always come back. I picture us as little mechanics trying to maintain and construct this behomoth, but the more we construct, the more mechanics are needed to fix and maintain the system.

The holy ritual is sleep. That is the communion. There is where we drift back into a reality that echoes a time before us and after us. But its always a taste. Not enough. It's only seen as "restorative" rather than preferred. Odd, being its the most peaceful part of life.

Sometimes I'll wallow a little and then go to sleep. Wallowing helps.

Quoting schopenhauer1

What does it say when sleep is preferred more than awake?

That the lack of agency and awareness of oneself in a dream is a respite from the tyranny of waking life. Yes?

Quoting Posty McPostface

That the lack of agency and awareness of oneself in a dream is a respite from the tyranny of waking life. Yes?

Exactly. Tyranny is a great word here. I'd like to explore that. What makes waking life tyrannical as opposed to the gentleness of the sleep-state (sans nightmares, I guess)?

Quoting schopenhauer1

What makes waking life tyrannical as opposed to the gentleness of the sleep-state (sans nightmares, I guess)?

It's hard to put this concept out without generalizing it; but, reality is seen as tyranny in contrast with the dream world. One doesn't need anything in a dream world and hence reality becomes moot, vacuous, and irrelevant.

One becomes entirely self sufficient, and entertained without imposed constraints, at least until the REM phase is over.

You sound clinically depressed. Insomnia is one of the major symptoms of depression. I wrote this as a response to your last thread but I'll post it here again because I think it's relevant:

inyenzi:I think part of what's going on with the philosophical pessimist 'mindset' is a projection from ones (miserable) conscious experience, out into the structure of the world.

So instead of, "my own conscious experience is a burden to me, I feel like all I do is get pushed and prodded by various sufferings/pains/deprivations into making various actions to strive against them, in some endless process with no overreaching purpose/meaning", the very personal, individualized nature of this conscious experience is projected outwards into the structure of the world: "the world is at it's core just suffering and striving". Schopenhauer's philosophy probably being the most flagrant example of this projection.

I think a solution to the pessimist mindset may be to stop the projection/extrapolation from your own conscious experience outwards entirely, and then to view your own conscious experience as being an individual, private, pathological experience. So what I mean is, instead of "the structure of the world is [as the pesimisst describes]", it's "my own life is experienced as a burden to me, and this is because I am a sick human being".

What difference does this make? Well, when the burdensome nature of your own experience is projected into the structure of the world, then there is no solution, or hope. What can you possibly do to alter the structure of the world? The only real 'solutions' seem to be suicide, or total world annihilation/antinatalism. Whereas when there is no projection outwards from your burdensome experience into the structure/nature of the world, the issue seems far more manageable. You can't change the structure of the world, but the structure of the world is not the issue here - the problem is merely your own pathological experience. You are just sick, and you can get better.

The whole project of philosophical pessimism strikes me as a sort of intellectual learned helplessness. People with quite obvious psychological sickness (call it anhedonia, depression, despair, etc) are drawn to the very philosophy that attacks and stifles any chance they have of getting better. Philosophical pessimism is something not to be argued against/debated, it's a pathology that is dissolved by getting well again.

So for example, to the anhedonic, it seems as if we merely eat because we're embodied within a being that has perpetual caloric needs, that suffers and pains us when it runs low, causing us to act against these pains/hungers. And so through this avoidance of hunger by the consumption of food, our existence and suffering (and ongoing need for calories) is therefore perpetuated. Which is actually what is happening for the anhedonic - it's not a wrong view of their own conscious experience. But the philosophical anhedonic/pessimist takes this very individual experience and projects it outwards into the structure of the world. It is as if everyone eats due to these same reasons. But the vast majority of the world gets actual genuine joy from eating, and judge the hunger pangs as a small, almost insignificant price to pay for the pleasure. The solution here is not for an ending of the anhedonics life, or a total ending of lives altogether - it's for the anhedonic/pessimist to find joy in eating again.

Having no reason to get up, taking zero joy in anything, just wanting to sleep away your entire life, suffering from insomnia - it sounds just like Major Depressive Disorder.

Reply to Inyenzi
This to me seems like a veiled ad hominem. Let's stick to what the topic is about. I don’t think psychologizing my point of view changes the structures of life..those brought about by being born in the first place. Why do you suppose it is the job of anyone or less radically, why is it justified to put people into the world at all- anhedonia or not? What do you think the major project of people being born, society, human endeavor is for? Why are we the arbiters of these things?