Hyperion

The prime experience is birth. Then, the next shift in consciousness is sleep. Whether infants' argillaceous brains mesmerize them, grant them a trance as passage through the great conduit of beauty and hope that their mothers are or in different terms they are souls endowed with the reflective consciousness we all learn to carry with us I do not know. It seems that the next common event where the psyche shifts is sleep. The measurable and indicated change in brain state must be a sole souvenir of the young person's experience, the only familiarity carried through the maternal love that bears the new adventurer into the world. Instinct and appetites, crying and growth, the efflorescence of the heart that is a purer mind meant to be endowed to any given soul are granted.

For the rest, we learn the game. Somnolence is the sanctuary of both the young and the old. I've heard that no one has ever died from a lack of sleep, but the life never lost has surely become unlivable. And more often than is considered, a man has killed another for sleep. Then a man, driven by desperation and fiendish madness, whether in war or in peace, would be charged to carry his laden conscience through sleep. There are no ways around it.

The alpha state before entering sleep is thought to be supportive of learning and memory. Humans have long been moved by the magical and symbolic experiences they share with themselves in their dreams. So valuable is sleep, like water, air, and light, that there is no earthen thing which I could not relinquish given an ultimatum between any imaginable treasure and to be able to sleep. When one sleeps well, one lives well and the days and nights assume their more vibrant and enriched textures, colors, lights, and sounds. The curse of ethereal days is lifted and gravity becomes more merciful and affectionate.

Love and death are so woven with sleep, with their pedestrian evocations and heavenly invocations, that they can be directly mated with the most innocent and warm-hearted fertilities of humilities. (sure: spectacular vernacular, amazing phrasing, goatherds words(coelho's alchemist)). What is meant is that Love can be sleepy and magical, all synchronicity and auspice when fine, painfully poetic and exhausting when mean. Similarly, Death is directly associated with a great sleep.

One great irony is the one Erik L-V observed: when your sheets are clean, and you are clean, and your bed is so nice you would gladly be its prey if such a predator it were, it's that one can actually resist drifting off to cool and quiet slumber so as not to miss out on the experience of beautiful and perfect comfort, as one exhales their burdens and begins to float lightly in the universe.

Human drama, purveyed for example by Shakespeare's Juliet and Chechen extremists in a theater in Moscow on October 23, 2002, in interests of forms of Love & Death, has established use of instruments to induce sleep. Both Juliet's romantic burden and the Chechen misadventures resulted in death. There is such a broad catalogue of characters and personalities of culture in the great soporific library of history that a list would be a work in its own. Theater is of no unique or articulately exemplary interest in focus or representation of the enormous symbolism of sleep and its arts & sciences, though the thespian superstition of sleeping with a script under one's pillow is a lovely cultural manifestation of the alpha brain state memory aggregation notion.

Whispers and traffic wake me. Dogs and sunlight call for me to come and fight. My own body rebels against my more divine psyche and leaves me reeling with pain, and the anticipation of seeing a dark ceiling causes me to hold my eyes tightly closed and shake and twist with panicked agony. The relief Juliet found was in a dagger. The Chechen brutes were made dead by the strongest variety of narcotic in gas form.

Cleanness and comfort, showering, and knowing that you are secure and sound are great rituals and accommodation necessary for rest of the restorative. Those moments before sleep are the best moments in one of this author's days, and those moments just after are some of the most challenging moments in this author's lifetime.

Somnus quiesco, my friends and enemies, somnus quiesco.