On Dreams

Originally: On Sleep & Dreams
Sleep is something we need - we actually would die without it - but it's something that we can't always have right when we want it. A good night sleep is what lets us feels refreshed, makes us feel alive again and it is where we are truly safe, free from the struggle of the daily grind. In some ways, it is the only way escape from life and the only place were everything we know is safe from change:

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?” - Ernest Hemingway 

As the world relative to you stop spinning when your eyelids close for the night; That is to say that you are sun that spots shining for a few hours each night when you are asleep. Intertwined with the characteristics mentioned above is the dream - one of the few things in this world that gives us real hope while also not being a tangible item we can buy at the store or on Amazon. They come and go as they please, sometimes impossible to figure out (or remember) but they are something that make you wake up in good mood and are only aided by that second cup of coffee. Above all, though,  dreams are were you life's biggest problems are solved:

"Sleep is the best mediation." - the Dalai Lama

When you sleep, you relax and you wake with the previous days problems wiped from your mind. Even if they come back later, there are moments each day were you have no worries and can just rest. Nothing - not any drug, not any liquor and not any food - is as powerful a force as sleep. So enjoy it, and don't ever - not even the night before that big final - skip it or get so much sleep that your groggy for hours after you wake up. Thus, it's essentially to get that perfect amount of sleep so you can get the most out of time you are awake, because in the end, that's what really matters:

"Those who have compared our life to a dream were right... we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep." - Michael de Montaigne 

Characteristics covered: Long sentences, lots of punctuation and quotations

Re-Write: 

Montaigne uses long sentences, lots of punctuation and vivid imagery in his writing. Those are the characteristics I aimed to emulate.

“Those who have compared our life to a dream were right... we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep." - Michael de Montaigne

A few nights back, I had the most vivid, peculiar dream set in – of all places – a church. I’m not – emphasis on the not– a religious person in any sense of the word. I haven’t been to church since I was very young and it’s not an experience I particularly remember enjoying then, when perhaps the music and sing-song should have kept me coming back.

I was alone in this church in this dream. There were no parishioners, no priests – just an empty chapel with a wandering, whimsical son sitting in the first pew. Right before waking up, a long-haired, bearded fellow put his hand on my shoulder, not saying a word, but calming me more than I had in days, staring right into my eyes and beyond.

I woke up feeling more relaxed, relived and refreshed than I had it days. I had only slept a little more than six hours and had gotten myself behind on some class reading, immediately make me feel tense and antsy. As I went to shower I quote came to mind:

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?” - Ernest Hemingway

Amen to that, I thought as I stepped into the shower, hoping that a good cleanse could recreate some of the previous night’s magic, even though I knew it to be a highly improbable occurrence.