Space Pirates Ltd.

Life, in all of its majesty, comes from dirt. A dark, solitary expanse of nothing that surrounds all the complexities of the world. When humans die they rot, lie alone surrounded by earth, and eventually turn into dirt – surely it is not too much of a stretch then to assume that at some point mankind and dirt were at least made from the same stuff. It is not the miniscule nutrients and minerals within the dirt that we must concentrate on however, but rather the bleakness of it. The nothing that we think of when we imagine what exists beneath the ground.

It is nothing that defines what exists. The first part of any piece of framework is nothing. It is no surprise then that the life that surrounds us has sprung up from nothingness – the same black void of unconsciousness that frames our lives both as entireties and as thousands of smaller segments.

There is something unnatural about waking up. There is no activity (except for perhaps falling in love) that puts so much mental strain on a person as traveling between sleep and consciousness. Nearly every twenty-four hours a person finds himself beginning his day by relearning the world around him, and forgetting smaller rules and subtleties which only moments earlier were as applicable as daylight. It is this transition that strains the mind, like a tourist traveling between two countries that not only speak different languages, but also obey opposite laws of physics. A child who spent his night dreaming of flying over the country will, upon waking, remember exactly how to do it again, but only until he stands up. A woman, who has dreamt the most beautiful song she has ever heard, will awake and immediately hear it one last time before forgetting it forever.

Such is the inconvenient and sometimes even exhausting shift between sleep and consciousness - a hard lesson learned every day by countless amounts of people. We cannot take with us those things that do not belong in this world. Perception may not be greater than reality, but it is most certainly separate from it. Those things that we do or say or experience or feel in our travels from truth fall under different rules than what we do in the lives that we have so carefully constructed in the time we are awake.

There is not always the promise of some wonderful fantasy adventure or euphoric sexual victory within dreams, however. Any number of dream realities containing any mixture of emotions is equally accessible, and equally impossible to predict. For every nonsensical pet that carries you through the sea there is a plummet into a terrible black abyss. For every imaginary enemy that you heroically defeat there is a reunion with a past love that, although you don’t know why, sends a sadness into your heart unlike any you have ever felt.

More often than not though, there is nothing. A dark, solitary expanse of nothing that stifles the thought and nullifies any vagaries of perception. Even if there is an astral journey or celestial experience that mankind experiences, it is doomed never to be remembered. As a result of this nature, or rather the lack thereof, time begins to lose its substance. At moments it takes clumsy leaps forward, at others it oozes along, slow and sticky.

Yet many people – all of us really, at some point in our lives – see sleep as an escape.

Anything else we can do in our lives that can possibly serve as a means of forgetting things is inadequate next to the impenetrable blanket of sleep. Being awake anywhere in the world brings along the unfortunate side effect of consciousness – a fateful human ailment that assures people can never fully escape their problems as completely as they would hope to.

Only through the oblivion of unconsciousness can we truly escape our problems in every sense of the word.

Unfortunately the very nature of sleep presents a paradox that is unavoidable to anyone who truly desires or needs it to get away from the waking world. One does not simply slip into the soft arms of a healing unconsciousness. A good sleep is more often than not unattainable by a troubled mind – dreads and worries linger and permeate, creating unrest and nightmares. The wearied walker whose hardships demand simple time away from the workaday humdrum often finds himself a victim of time – caught in a sleep that lasts only a moment and seems to only make a body even more tired.

Though the only real escape from the world around us, the nothingness of sleep is so dense that we cannot even remember it, making any concept of “time away from home” superfluous. In an incredibly cruel trick that we pull on ourselves, as oftentimes we fall into a slumber inhabited by multitudes of feelings. An attempt to escape our waking worries may not yield a night of rest, but one of pure, unadulterated emotion. Happiness or depression carries very little significance for the subconscious.

Too often will someone wanting nothing more than to forget that they exist dream of an event carrying an emotion more affirming that he is a living, feeling human than anything that could happen to him in real life. By trying to escape we jump into a vast ocean of nothing, populated by feelings and emotions the like of which we rarely see in our waking lives. It cannot be assumed that what we are feeling before we go to sleep will consistently carry over with us. Like some inescapable gamble, sleep may tap into a vast palette of emotion, or even simply leave our minds blank and insubstantial before tossing us back into reality, disoriented and lost. How many brides have sat up on the night of their marriage crying about something they can’t remember? How many prisoners of war have woken up smiling without having any idea why?

When considering the nature of dirt and the nothingness that it makes up, it is important to see what has come along with it. Miniscule buds rise up out of the ground into a sunlight splotched by the leaves of a California Redwood. Row upon row of trees line a countryside, an elaborate pattern house to children running through a forest – all walks of life cradled and framed within a deep stretch of raw earth, containing nothing within itself but the seeds for even more life. It is this contrast that we must notice. The dark, solitary expanse of nothingness that stands complacently on either end of existence. Emptiness is not an end to existence, but rather a frame of it. Sleep is not an escape from life, but rather an affirmation of it.

Philosophers, monks, and introverts spend much of their lives looking inward at the powers of a person’s mind. Psychedelic drugs are consumed to attempt and tap into some sort of potential – to control a palette of feelings that exists within us all, and yet is accessed more often than we realize. Usually when we are simply trying to rest between shifts and recharge our frail, workaday bodies, our subconscious will toss us into marvelous situations that fill us with vast combinations of glee, fear, lust, depression, and an entire smorgasbord of indescribable emotions that remind us just how human we really are. It is the sheer, pure humanity in us that causes us to bolt upright at ungodly hours in the morning crying or laughing or sweating or trembling.

Conversely, the darkness and solitude of a mind blanketed by a deep, dreamless, unconsciousness is truly the loneliest state that any one person can exist in. During these times our perceptions simply do not exist, and we are isolated even from everything that exists in reality, including ourselves. These are the spots of nothingness that frame our day to day experiences, just as the dirt below our feet affirms the life existing around it. This is the nature of sleep. Sometimes a colorful affirmation of our own humanity, sometimes a dark nothingness containing a contrast that breathes a vibrant color into a world well worth waking up in.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 8:19 am and is filed under Pirate Brew Ha-Ha. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.