Lucid Waking

People talk about lucid dreaming. Just once I’d like to be lucid when I’m awake.

I arose from blessed oblivion again this morning. It’s a shared oblivion that encompasses the origins of the universe itself. We share our beds with galaxies and comets in utero. The oblivion at the core of sleep isn’t the oblivion of lifelessness, nor is it a rejection of earthly existence, but a reunion with the primordial egg of undeceived Being at the heart of earthly life.

Every night we get the chance to recapitulate the origins of the world and awaken with a Big and creative Bang, which is not will, which is not choice, but a spontaneous eruption of something unprecedented in who we are. After all, we can’t choose what exceeds our comprehension.

I love the insistently hinting dreams of early morning. The timeless oblivion of the depths crashing on the shores of waking life, bending the scraps of memory so that they seem like messages in a bottle, warning me of the sleepwalking illusions of “being awake”.

There is a moment in the passage between fluid sleep and the seemingly solid ground of waking when you are neither. In that suspended space (an eternal space that only appears fleeting when you leave) you realize that the dreams of night were not real after all. And when you turn that same cleansed look towards shore, and peer through all the repetitive dramas of waking life, you see that they are no more solid than the dreams of night.

In a sense, we awaken without yesterday’s historical script in hand and stand naked before the cosmos, cleansed of all the ridiculous notions of who I was, all the dramas in which I see myself trapped or injured or doomed to repetitions of inanity, all the scripts with which we swathe the innocent newborn until this racist, xenophobic clothing is absorbed into the infant’s body (no wonder it screams), an enclosing garb that has become invisible and unconscious. That’s when we lose our waking lucidity.

And every morning it’s another chance (not choice) to emerge from the primordial bed freely or submit to resuming the sleepwalk of an endless round of yesterdays.

In the very earliest moments of waking this morning there it was again — that spot from which we can look without the eyes of time at time’s embedded shapes.

Ignore the devil urging us to come to our “senses” quickly. In this space, you and I can see his motives. He doesn’t want us to notice the trap of waking life for that awareness is lucidity itself, that’s how easily the cage is broken. That’s the secret he keeps from us, the nearness of freedom.

And yet we’re never going to hold this suspended state, because everything we hold too tightly is grounded in one dreamy belief or another. We have to lose our freedom in order to notice how it happens. We must lucidly fall asleep.

So we can’t be afraid to sign our name on the pages of fine print, where we each commit to the point of view of the moron we were yesterday. Freedom was already lost the moment we rebelled too much from our trap. Now we’re only dreaming of escape. But even that is no problem, because lucidity is merely an awareness of the trap.

But this morning as I floundered around in the vicinity of the shore, reading the various messages in the bottled dreams floating next to me, I think I recall seeing the devil in hip boots handing me a second pen, because the first was too wet to use. [They have trouble getting me to sign because I’m a forgetful idiot when I’m not writing; I’m usually confined to a brightly lit space that extends no more than 10 or 12 hours in the past. Beyond that everything is hearsay. Beyond that I don’t remember anything other than my wife’s birthdays and other important tasks].

Sometimes I resemble a colic newborn when I awake, whining so loudly about the bus, the work, the usual daily emergencies, that I can barely keep any cornflakes in my mouth.

My lazy minded approach to life sometimes even gets on the devil’s nerves.

He goes over the previous day’s dramas with me as I get dressed, insisting that I resume last night’s petty grievances.

Let’s go over the script a few times to be clear, he says.

The first lines you hear at the breakfast table (not from my wife, she’s sweet, so leave her out of it, if possible), come from the devil at my left shoulder. He says, you’re guilty for every monstrosity your character performed prior to your waking oblivion. And he has the unmitigated gall to give me documented proof that my character did this and that prior to sweet oblivion.

Therefore, he argues with impeccable logic, you can’t abandon the script. Too many other people are tied up in your dramatic dream for you to walk off scot free at this point. Either pay reparations for your wrongfully obtained privilege or claim might makes right and ignore the gathering mob, but either way you have to resume the crude and stupid drama of yourself!

I mean, look it up, he says, your goddamn name is on the document proving that you defrauded your neighbor to get this house in which you’re still trying to eat breakfast.

But that was yesterday, I argue, at 10:13pm, when I stole the house. Let’s think about today, shall we? You’ve got your head in the past, Devil, it’s all about the future (corn flakes billowing out my mouth).

The argument with myself at the breakfast table disturbs my lovely wife, which thickens the day’s plot in which I’m already caught.

From the devil’s point of view there is no timeless oblivion, so get over illusions of freedom. There’s only this material causation, which leaves the presence of the past in all things that trap you.

The devil is a stickler for logic, even if he’s an idiot.

That’s not what Sheldrake meant, I counter, when he spoke of “the presence of the past.”

Well, how can there be a timeless state of mind when everything is composed of history?

You’re sincerely confused, aren’t you devil? The trap in which we’re caught isn’t the problem for us that you imagine. All we have to do is notice the trap of time and we’re free of time’s petty pace.

At this point in the day’s developing dream I’m only thankful that my sweet wife can’t make heads or tails of what I’m saying with so many cornflakes in my mouth.

The debate ends in the usual draw, for even if I’m right (and I am), I’m still trapped, so how the fuck do I know what is freedom and what is not?

Now I’m checking the clock to see how many more hours until sweet oblivion.