The Sleep-Death Riddle

How is it that we fear death but not sleep? We know no more about sleep than we do death. Even science has not figured out what causes our need for sleep, where we go when we do sleep, and how our dreams manifest themselves.

We -- most of us -- go to bed each night for the purpose of inviting sleep. Not only do we not fear it, we welcome it, albeit we don’t know where we’re going, once we lose that last bit of conscious thinking, drifting off to another plane -- in our minds? -- in our bodies? -- in our souls? There’s no guarantee that we will awaken in the morning. And yet, despite the fact that explanation of sleep eludes us, we invite sleep with great expectations, repeating this cycle over and over, and sometimes resorting to sleep inducers if we feel it may not visit us.

Deprived of sleep, we become foggy, cranky and out of sync. We lament that we didn’t sleep well the night before, or that we got only 4 hours of sleep, and on and on. We’ve been cheated out of our trip to that deep, dark secretive place for 8 hours, that neverland that is almost never the same as the night before, except that sometimes it’s pleasant, sometimes not. Yet, imagine the complaint of having lived for 80 years and not yet died! The lament might be something like this: “I feel awful. I’ve been around here for 80 years, and because of all the busy-ness and happiness in my life, I haven’t been able to catch up on dying!“

Hold on. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz

La Madre