Dreaming
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Let's Explore for a moment common sense notions about why we sleep.
But why sleep all in a chunk? Why not distribute that physiological state evenly throughout our days and nights? Does the Earth's periodicity remain in us, just as its sea remains in our blood?
Electric lights has changed our experience of light and dark. We now live in perpetual mid-summer. So is there any good reason why we need to sleep long hours anymore? Many of us are perpetually sleep-deprived. Is there any reason why our species can't "do better" and evolve the means to survive without sleep? Perhaps a sort of natural selection is going on right now that will eventually liberate our species from what has become an evolutionary anachronism. Perhaps electric lights favors those mutants among us who are capable of continual consciousness, growing and repairing themselves in a flickering rhythm the rest of us don't even notice.
How strange to think of creatures whose wakefulness, sleeping, and dreaming is tightly interwoven, rather than assigned distinct and extended circadian timeslots.
But dreaming... That's another story. We might imagine dreamless sleep fractured into nanosecond frames whose fleeting alternations with wakefullness are largely unconscious and unnoticed. But can we imagine dreaming that way? Dreaming creates stories our consciousness is usually surprised to remember. Playback & recollection, when it does come, takes time.
Created 11/18/98. Last updated
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Dreaming
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