I realized something about myself and assumptions i have about my world view last night. I always have considered my day to end when i go to sleep. I have never considered the end of the day to be midnight so if i am writing a journal entry about the day and it is 2 AM when i write it, i will always put the date for the day that standard clock time says ended at 12 midnight. Likewise, the day starts for me when i wake up in the morning. Some of my healthiest feeling times are out in the woods hiking with no artificial light sources and my day tends to start lining up with the day of the sun. When it starts to get dark, i go to sleep and when the sun rises, i return to consciousness. That happens to a lot of people out hiking for long periods on an extended hike.
I notice even now that when i wrote the last i said, "return to consciousness." That is what i realized last night. I fundamentally believe that but the question is where is the consciousness returning from. My day ends when i pass into sleep and the new day begins when i wake. There is a portion of time, sleep time, dream time if you will, that is not covered in any of my world view's definition of what a day is. That "time" that exists while sleeping is outside of my cycle of days. It is a type of non-time, a veil that exists between the days.
This is a really fascinating concept to me and jives with the work i have been doing on dreaming and dream recall. There is another place we go to when we are asleep. The rules and flow of time do not follow the rules of our waking selves in that place. I like this concept and am going to keep thinking about it. A big part of my mission in the past few months, and at other times in my life, is to navigate that other place. I want to pierce that veil and bring my conscious self into that dream state, that other non-time that exists in the spaces between the days.
As a side note, i have had people tell me that i am just wrong about this, the day ends at midnight. That really has nothing to do with anything inherent in the world. It is convention and is convenient for our calendars, but we could have easily chosen something else. Our experience lived as humans really seems to suggest an end or beginning happening at dawn or sunset, or darkness. We can actually experience those things without the aid of a watch.
The dream state is always fascinating to me, and like you I have ALWAYS wanted to be able to be in control of it. I want to be able to decide there, in that other world, what I do, when I do it, and how I do it. What a marvelous escape from reality that would be, and how amazing to me our minds don't readily allow for this. One wonders what fantasies for example might be quelled if we could do it in our dreams, and not be compelled to do it in our real lives.
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