‘The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows. '~Gaston Bachelard.
I woke up last night at 2:20 and started thinking about stuff. Waking up in the middle of the night and fixating on one thing is bad, but thinking about stuff is much, much worse. In the case of last night, all the stuff revolved around religion and politics – two subjects that I usually avoid. Apparently, as the quote above suggests, I needed to ‘sweep out the shadows.’
I know from experience that if I want to suppress the brain chatter and get back to sleep I have two choices; and both are equally effective: I can try to employ an Asian meditation technique I learned which involves imagining warm liquid gelatin being pumped into my head and oozing in, filling all the gaps between my skull and my brain, then slowly setting as my mind loses all connection to the outside world and my consciousness fades to black; or I can pop in any DVD starring Steve Guttenberg. Last night, however, I decided to strap myself in, and run with the chatter. Here’s some of last night’s stuff:
- I’ve been a-political all my life, but have recently really gotten into the John Edward’s campaign. I wonder if I should volunteer my services as a writer to him. I mean, he’s one of my Twitter friends, that makes us almost like real buddies – right?
- Dude – Where’s My God? Where did this thought come from?!? Is it really as profound as I think it is, or am I in that limbo of partial-consciousness where every idea sounds great? If one of the beliefs of Christianity is that Jesus died for our sins, and that God loves the world and sacrificed his only son to show how much He loves the world, then what does that say about the kind of God that God really is? I mean does this mean that God found no other way to forgive our sins than to have his own son tortured and killed in a horrible way? This God sounds more like one of the Inca Gods who were all about sacrifice, than our notion of an all-loving God.
- I’ll bet that one of the reasons that the president allocates so much money toward ‘keeping peace in the Middle East’ instead of toward finding a cure for cancer is that if the war in Iraq and his campaign against terrorism is looked at as a success – even in the distant future - President Bush will be remembered as a great hero. But, if he concedes and signs a bill allocating ten billion dollars to cancer research which results in a cure, the doctor and his team who announce the cure will be written into the history books as the hero, not the president.
