UPON a fairly recent trip to Kalamazoo, MI, with the aim of presenting at the International Congress for Medieval Studies, I was obliged to sacrifice a rather significant quantity of sleep. It was a few days after the conclusion of the semester; predictably I had not yet convalesced from the exhaustion of exam season. My itinerary was tough reading: I had to wake at three o’clock to catch a train at four, and then arrive in time for the cross-state train just before six. I promised myself I would be in bed as early as a babe. This ended up not quite being the case; one of my closest friends was still in residence, so subsequently (I had no choice) he and I shared one too many drinks and I ended up in bed at about one o’clock in the morning. What was worse, the two short hours that I did try to savour were interrupted by frequent screams and squeals from inebriate seniors who had finished their final exams that evening - and, what is more, my duvet and pillow were both absent, as I had been forced to give both to a different American friend to keep over the summer whilst I returned to old Blighty.
All these tribulations aside, the logistics went swimmingly: I caught the Metra into Chicago, and from there stumbled about with my clueless British accent, asking local construction workers the direction to the Amtrak, and arrived just in time for my state-sweeping trip to Michigan. Rather humorously (not at the time, it must be said), just as I believed myself slipping off into sweet slumber, I was awoken with a fright by the train’s unreasonably loud and abrasive horn, which I soon discovered was to be yanked without fail every two or three minutes for the duration of the four-hour journey. So, quite contre coeur, I remained awake. The day passed with much more ardour and hilarity, two instances of which I will list here: I very nearly fell dead asleep in the middle of a seminar on Aquinas’ prelapsarian politics, and to my knowledge received at the very least one glare from a committed (Neo-, I presume) Thomist in the second row. At another point, I found myself nodding off while trying to read the first page of Robert Myles’ Chaucerian Realism - the name of which I know because I purchased it right there and then at the book sale, perhaps out of embarrassment when the vendor jolted me awake by asking me whether I was interested.
I arrived home at quarter to two in the morning, and slept well. The following day, my senses somewhat returned, I was able to reflect more intensely on the experience of having been awake, with the most occasional and limited break, for the better part of thirty-five hours. I could not help but recall in particular Nietzsche’s occasional aphorisms concerned with sleep (‘…we, whose task is wakefulness itself…’1), and, perhaps strangely, felt in myself a kinship to his valiant, precarious, yet surely exhausting idiom, which he used to emphasise the noble affirmation of life over nihilism in spite of suffering. Not wishing to draw laughs from the comparison, there were undercurrents to my wakefulness which felt like the dangerous exhaustion involved in a kind of overexposure to life by a weakened spirit. Perhaps, at end, it felt as though I might well be teetering on the verge of some knowledge I simply could not acquire in my habitual, sleep-filled living, if only I had the strength to persist with open eyes. There was something truly alien to my experience - something which made me wonder what it might be like for different life forms, with similar or far further advanced forms of consciousness than us, who may have little or no need for sleep at all.
One may delve fairly deeply down a rabbit hole here. We can easily find those frightening calculations which inform us of the ostensibly absurd proportion of our earthly lives we (must) spend sleeping, which always seem staggeringly unbalanced. This, combined with various fables of sleepless high achievers (Da Vinci allegedly took numerous twenty-minute kips during a day to maximise his creative potential, Napoleon was said to far prefer nocturnal battle-planning to rest, and rumour has it that Thatcher was similarly averse to a good night’s sleep) may lead us to wish our natural constitution was not commanded by such a need. We may even begin to listen to the egregious fabrications of your average uber-fit American celebrity - obsessed as their culture is with self-mortification for the sake of mammon’s remuneration - designing a daily schedule of minimum rest for maximum gawks, implying that one sleeps only if one does not wish to be successful. We might further wonder just where humanity may happen to be if we did not need to sleep; what more we may have achieved by this point in our history with the doubling of our time - what cures we may have fashioned, what technologies we may have constructed, what knowledge of the universe we may have ascertained. We might wonder, in passages of plaintive reminiscence, just how many artistic masterpieces were lost because the ideas occurred to the mind just as it slipped into unconsciousness; how many could not be recalled after manifesting in dreams.
But yes - dreams. My experience throughout and especially toward the latter end of that day began not only to widen and oversaturate my capacity to perceive reality, but moreover blurred the distinction between that reality and reverie. Events occurred in slower or altered times in my experience, often only clicking in my mind some seconds after they took place (another healthy warning that driving while tired is an immensely irresponsible thing to do), and this was often because my mind was helplessly occupied with this or that particularly strange, even irrational, line of internal thought. But what is perhaps most uncanny of all is the way in which my senses themselves - most intimately, my sense of touch - began to shift away from normalcy and into a foreign, altered state. The feeling of my hand on the warm tea as I sat awake on the Amtrak, the feeling of Caesar salad crunching between my molars in the local sports bar; these experiences now seemed odd, different, almost open. It felt as though, with each passing hour, my being was becoming ever so slightly unanchored from its former concreteness. Not washed away in some dramatic deluge, of course - just moving enough to remind me of its undeniable and perpetual fluidity.
To keep with theme: my university friends know all too well that I am a notoriously frequent somnambulist. I must confess that the stories they tell me of my nocturnal escapades are at times somewhat troubling. Not wishing to expose myself too lucidly to any psychoanalysts amongst my readership, my sleepwalking episodes have most habitually involved an unquestioned impulse to urgently leave for an inexplicable but incontrovertible reason; often this involves standing upon my bed and tearing my posters of Sean Connery, Bob Dylan, and The Velvet Underground from the walls, tucking them under my arm or throwing them to the floor, before marching onward, near-nudity notwithstanding, into hallways, down stairways, and even (once I came very close indeed) outside dormitory doors with automatic locks.
Another memorable instance involved the desperate desire to leave (again), but a complete lack of knowledge as to the location of my door. I recall spending what was most likely the better part of five minutes standing inches away from a flat wall on the opposite side of my bedroom, trying to twist an imaginary doorknob and wondering why my path was not opening before me. On some occasions I have been terrified: I once woke up a roommate in a frenzy, telling him that I could not return to bed because ‘I can see someone climbing through the wall’. On others, I have been the source of terror: that same poor roommate awoke on a different night to discover me perched with two feet on the edge of his mattress, staring at him with open, silent eyes.
What I hope this is not is an instance of frightful oversharing (forgive me). What it should serve to do, rather, is offer another example of a state wherein occurs some invariably fascinating contortion of reason and typically-accepted ‘common sense’ - most saliently of all, the ‘common sense’ of who or what we are. The impressions of what is ‘ours’ (e.g. our bodies, our feelings, etc.) often go quite unquestioned, and indeed to a certain extent appear wholly necessary to ensure survival. There is perhaps a joke to be made about the monk who is so detached from his earthly body that he forgets to flee from a hungry tiger - who, for one, is more than happy to pick up the flavourful scraps of a now abandoned ‘worldly prison’. But placing jokes aside, as any tracing of the history of religion will reveal, once the question of survival is resolved (whilst never itself actually being primary - all efforts to live suggest a yet more primordial reason to make the effort at all), civilisations, comprised as they are of a collection of human consciousnesses, tend to reflect on the meaning of life, and -radically - tend to find it rather intriguing subject. And with its reflection, many philosophies and spiritualities arose which began to query, much to the chagrin of the hard pragmatists, precisely where ‘we’ end and the ‘hungry tiger’ begins. It is a question which, once we have hurdled the scoffs of those so engrossed in a dualistic, divided reality that they cannot possibly conceive anything other than what has arbitrarily been determined as ‘obvious’, does not have a particularly clear answer.
One of the most valuable demonstrations of this principle comes from Buddhism, and the doctrine of dependent arising (pratītyasamutpāda), near-universally shared across Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. The Buddha draws an analogy between selfhood and a chariot in such a context:
‘Just as, with an assemblage of parts,
The word ‘chariot’ is used,
So, when the aggregates are present,
There’s the convention “a being”’ (Vajjira Sutta, SN 5.10).
Perhaps more famous to western undergraduates would be the sophistic puzzle of the ‘Ship of Theseus’, which asks us to what extent a given object bears identity across even the most radical of material or temporal processes of change. In any case, though the latter seems to have inspired all manner of responses, the former resides firmly within a tradition that proffers an accepted answer: any belief in an immutable essence (svabhava) or self in the components of an entity themselves is illusory.
One hopes this should invite us to form a marginally more sophisticated conception than that of Aristotle, who although designing an important distinction between substance (ousia) and accident (sumbebekos) still tends to imagine a given entity as a kind of atom; an untouchable nucleus at the centre, cushioned by an untraversable distance of empty vacuum, but ultimately gyrated by all manner of contingent properties. Not to say that this need be discarded, of course - Aristotle remains utterly indispensable to Christian, Jewish, and Islamic philosophies - only that the true nature of such a qualitative distinction ought to be properly understood. All manner of dissonance between Occident and Orient seem to have sprung up regarding this point; today many tend to find it rather opprobrious should you suggest to them that they do not possess a ‘soul’ - if, specifically, that is to mean some unchanging glowing fibre at the centre of their body, that comforting and ennobling concept to which they defer the deepest and most profound sentiments or appeals to moral dignity.
To be fair, this kind of definition is also not especially far off the mark. The only issue is precisely that it is considered a thing which exists alongside other things, and - most controversially of all, I understand - exists independent of Ultimate Reality. Within various Vedic and later Vedantic traditions, the meditative practice of ‘Neti neti’ consists of a process of continual consideration and negation, wherein one consecutively reflects upon the experiences and entities of the world - say, the faculty of hearing, the smell of lavender, the feeling of one’s left hand - and realises that they are ‘Not them’; revealing the priorly unfocused truth that one is not reducible to any of the ontic elements which comprise their material existence or earthly experience. Rather, the disclosure made at the end of this process is ideally one wherein one comes to recognise that one is ‘No-thing’, literally non-existent in terms of worldly objects - whether tangible or intangible - and has being only as unified and simple experience itself, rather than simply a ‘thing’ that ‘does’ the experiencing of ‘other things’.
But thia recognition is, despite its veracity, a really rather scary one. Even an experience as simple as placing your hand on the doorknob and twisting it open is buttressed by a complex of precognitions and preconceptions, an entire order of mentality which exhaustibly individuates your psychology to this particular moment, labouring hard to adapt whenever new circumstances arise. In many ways the fervour and complexity of such a web of associations is motivated by the impression that the feeling of being unattached to anything would herald disaster. It is in this way, after all, that all manner of mental illnesses begin to take hold in the mind: when one would rather cling to an inner architecture of self-contempt and harm than face the simple fact that no positive worldly judgement can actually sustain us in our sense of self. The job of the therapist, psychiatrist, or the like is often therefore to coax the wounded feeling back into the light, allow it to be properly mourned, and from thence let some semblance of the former openness to life be restored - that is, to enable the client to relinquish the intensity of their psychological grasp on the negative feeling or thought and by extension the destructive behaviour in which it often manifests.
The phenomenology of ascent toward this ‘middle ground’, then, is one which must assume a kind of dreamlike quality; an inherent willingness to break ourselves off, ever so slightly, from a vision of the ‘real’ as some received and incontrovertible set of facts about the world rather than a conditioned and particular disposition we have unconsciously assumed toward experience - and then, atop this, called a ‘self’. We must learn not to stick to the walls of being: not to press ourselves against sensuous experience, positive valuations, or ephemeral emotions like nervous teens huddling in the corners at a party, eyes cast downard into their red solo cups. We must stand in the middle of the room, with nothing solid to grasp, and dance.
Part II to follow.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 2. Indeed, Nietzsche’s meaning in this passage, with its anti-Platonist bent, is attempting to demonstrate the flimsy illusion of truth as that which supposedly persists beyond opinion and is to be ascertained concretely by reason; much the same intuition the dreamer should know well.