Dead to the world. But maybe finally alive?
Is death (and loss) all that it’s made out to be?
Sleep has been eluding me my whole life. Before you trash this as hyperbole (as you probably should), hear me out.
Isn’t it true that while we ritualize and prepare for sleep, by changing into pjs, turning down the lights, brushing teeth (or not, who’s judging), getting under the covers, listening to music at a certain frequency, and by waiting; for minutes, maybe hours for sleep to arrive, we are never actually conscious at the moment when it does arrive to celebrate with a Hurrah? And then eight hours later, or ten (again who’s judging?), we wake up to realize it’s gone! We couldn’t catch it, touch it, smell it, photograph it aesthetically for Instagram, nothing. It’s like it never was. Isn’t it then the elusive phenomenon that we only hypothesise about on a subjective level? I say ‘subjective’ because I hear you throwing ‘sleep science’ at me. I am all for science of all kind, but could we please validate with personal experience? Which is why Astral Travel and Lucid Dreaming are areas that hugely fascinate me. But that is a topic for another day. Today’s topic is Death.
I wonder sometimes if sleep is what death feels like, but on a whole new, I’m-exiting-this-xbox-game-and-playing-on-a-PS5 level. I won’t be able to write about it when I do find out (but maybe able to transmit my findings in a different way to those tuned in, who knows), so bear with me my somewhat derivative hypothesis.
Just like in sleep, where we are certain that we will indeed fall asleep at some point, we can be certain that we will all indeed die, or stop existing in this human form. Some are aware of this even in the moments before death. But in the exact moment when we stop breathing or when our heart stops, or body shuts down, we are unaware. We are rendered completely unconscious. But what if we are only then finally conscious? Both in sleep and in death?
I will admit that I’ve wondered more than once if it is only in our dreams that real life is being lived, and on waking our memory is erased in order to maintain order in the matrix (yeah, I said it). That in death we finally exit this simulation we call Human Life on a small rock, and go back to actual living in a different dimension or frequency that is our Real Life? What if we are indeed living under a rock thinking this is what ‘actual life’ is? What if death is when we go back to our home planet or Universe to divulge all the (useless) data we uncovered blunderingly during our brief stay here? What if on the other side we finally wake up from this deep sleep of eating, sleeping and procreating, and realize that we feared this thing called ‘Death’ for nothing. That it was nothing but a liberation from transient joy and suffering that occurred with disturbingly unpredictable frequency? What if it is on the other side that we realize that we no longer have limitations of space and time and whatever else it is our human mind could not even imagine? What if it is beyond the veil that we find freedom? What if it is on the outside that we realize what we were inside this whole time?
I have had a period of loss recently where I lost a very close friend, but also some beliefs that I held closely. The grief has been difficult to go through, as grief always is, but the thought that perhaps death or loss is also transient in nature, and is not all it is made out to be, gives me comfort. I do not know what you are going through, but I hope it might give you comfort too.
