Awake

5am musings on mornings, and dreams, and moments

There’s an energy and stillness found in mornings that we cannot access at any other time of day. Not during the 9 to 5 rush and flurry of activity with people hustling and bustling about. Not during the slowing lethargy of the afternoon daze. Neither within the sleepless nights of insomniacs, nor the spent bodies of night owls who have yet to fall into slumber. These are not the moments I mean. I mean the moments when you are awake and the rest of the world isn’t. There’s a silence that hums from the deep sleep of others. The silence of their dreams. It’s almost like we can feel the energy of those dreams, all those unconscious and subconscious forces deep at work in our minds, churning away, making sense of things, of life, of people. So unbidden, so uncontrolled. Unfiltered. Unabridged.

I wonder if when we’re awake and everyone around us is fast asleep, if we can tap into that force. I wonder if that’s why sometimes, if we sit still enough, if we listen closely enough to the whispers, the hushed noises of those dreams, these mornings can become so filled with surprising insights and visions. About life. About others. About ourselves. Maybe because the sheer silence of the conscious world makes the noise of the subconscious more palpable. Maybe because when everyone else is asleep, we are graced with some unbound access to their dreams, their thoughts; access to all the worlds that remain utterly unknown even to the most fully conscious of us. The worlds none of us quite remember, but experience nonetheless.

Maybe when everyone else is asleep, we are there in that energy, steeped right in the midst of it. Alive. Aware. Their dreamy whispers become our silence. Their sleepy silence drowns our chatter. Our endless, mindless, mental chatter. And without chatter, we are left with stillness, that quiet, pure noise that is simply energy, existing. We can no longer distract ourselves from it. It becomes all we have, all we know, in that moment. It becomes—or perhaps more precisely, it remains—all that is Real, and True, in that very moment.

I think more than just tapping into that force, we are actually connecting to it. Our subconscious to theirs. We connect not just into a source, but as an integral part of it. It that would be incomplete without us. It’s an exquisitely captivating moment, a crossing over of worlds and states, of dreams and wakefulness, of the fully conscious, half-conscious, and the unconscious, subconscious. And when our days can be filled with so many illusions of the concrete, the separate, the disconnected, this connection, this union, this oneness—is almost otherworldly.

There’s something beautiful about embarking upon our day from such an other-worldly state. From there we simply descend into the worldly, into reality and the concrete, into chatter and noise and going about our business. Yet we keep with us that memory of wakeful dreams, of lucid imaginings, and somehow it changes us. It primes us. When we begin our day opened, primed for connection, we cannot help but recognize and receive it when we find it within the walls of the concrete world.

Why does this matter?

Because every moment we spend in the Real is a moment of Truth: of being, and living, wholly. And in a world burdened with so many broken realities and broken dreams, broken families, broken selves, to live wholly is a remarkable feat.

But mostly, I think it’s because every moment we connect with one another, we are crossing over. Into that other-worldly state. To exist for a moment within the Real, without illusion. Without the noise of chatter silencing the still, pure voice of Truth. Everyone appears wide awake you see, but this is the illusion. Because everyone is still asleep. Everyone is still asleep. By connecting, eye to eye, face to face, heart to heart, we wake each other up from our automated, autopilot selves. Wake up to what is Real. Wake up to Truth. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up!

The day we all become fully alive and aware within our wakeful dreams, our lucid imaginings, is the day it will truly become morning. Not just for you, or for me. For all of us. For we will all, finally, be awake. Alive. Conscious. Connected. That break of dawn, that new day, will mark for us the beginning of a new kind of living. A new kind of world. Another world.

An other-world.

That is the world I want to exist in. All the time. Because the more Real you are, the more Real I can be. The more Real we all, and everything, will be. The Real is the closest we can ever be to Truth. The Real is the closest we can ever be to Love. Most of all, it’s the closest we can be. To one another.

One, and an other.

One.

And so my darling,

if I ever gaze gently upon your face to bid you good morning,
and you are puzzled to see that it is afternoon, or evening, or late at night, well, it is simply because of this:

I am awake,
in that very moment,
with you.