Insomnia

Hi I can’t sleep and I want to talk about something that’s been swirling around my head for months. Trouble is, I have 0 clue how to articulate everything without sounding loony. Imma try though.

About a year ago, I had this super vivid dream. Hyperrealistic dreams aren’t new to me as they’re a side effect of my antidepressants, sometimes I wake up sweating or crying or just super confused about where I am even if it’s my bedroom. It’s super weird.

Anyways, in this dream, my friend and I were driving in his truck. This tiny tonka truck, red with a small cluttered truck bed littered with empty soda cans and doritos bags. It was winter, and the bed was filled with snow just like the surrounding forests along the highway we were on. My friend was blasting some song and my window was rolled down and I was cold because it was snowing but I was feeling myself, vibing, dancing, singing, the usual. It was the afternoon I think, after a little bit the snow started to pick up so I rolled up my window with the tonka truck hand crank and my friend pulled off an exit. And we took a left when the light turned green and we drove onto this little overpass bridge, two lanes with railings on both sides overlooking the highway.

Suddenly something gave way underneath us, and my friend steered towards the right just as the bridge began to collapse inward, and we both stay completely silent as the truck drops like a bungee jumper. I remember that distinct feeling of freefalling as if I had stepped off a skyscraper, just falling. It’s an unmistakable feeling, so bold and heavy and limitless that’s so terrifying you can’t even scream or blink, you just fall. It was silent, my friend and I just stared out the dash as we nosedived (nosedove?) into a black and white abyss no screams or pain or anything, and then we landed. The truck sorta bounced a little and my ass felt sore as the tires absorbed the force of the asphalt. I remember looking around at my friend and the trees and the clouds, and we just sat there feeling like we had died. Then we drove away.

That dream felt so real that I actually asked my friend about the time we drove off a highway and survived a few months ago. I was so incredibly convinced it happened. Usually in dreams when you fall or die you wake up, but this one just slapped me with the feelings of chaos and adrenaline and death and I know it’s a dream but it just can’t be.

Have you ever had dreams like that?

Lately I haven’t been dreaming much at all, I just fall asleep and wake up. That transition of sleeping and waking up still astounds me after 20 years of being a professional sleeper. Most of the time I don’t remember actually falling asleep, I just close my eyes and open them and 8 hours have passed. Dreams come and go, but from what I know even if you don’t remember your dream, the human mind dreams with every sleep. I’ve got no way of proving that, but that’s what scientists believe. Brain scans and all that, a sleeping person exhibits more brain activity asleep than awake. Most nights, the mind experiences a dream and then forgets it entirely, unless a person wakes up in the middle of it or experiences lucidity or whatever else. Those dreams that we don’t remember are exactly what I want to discuss, well kinda.

I went to a catholic high school, and during my junior year we took a class called world religions. We learned about Buddhism and Hinduism and both of those religions have this one big belief about life and death. They believe that life is a circle of birth and existence and death; they call it samsara. Buddhism actually thinks it’s kind of like a curse, that the constant cycle is filled with meaningless bullshit that souls can’t shake, until they reach nirvana which is the ultimate goal of everything, an understanding of the universe and a true freedom from suffering. Nirvana is the tits, and everybody will just keep wandering and suffering life after life until something happens and you figure it all out.

I think it’s a really cool idea to explain existence like this. Souls in samsara, while they’re “suffering,” cycle around and become animals or ghosts or even gods. And at the end of it, your memory gets wiped and you become something new, forever looping. Millions of people worldwide look forward to their next life and cross their fingers they’ll become a bird or a cat or whatever.

But this whole belief doesn’t make sense to me.

As a person, you probably don’t remember any of your past lives (assuming you’ve had some anyways). And according to the cycle, after you die you’ll become something new and keep going. But there’s a problem for me; why are you experiencing this right now? Going back to dreams, every night the mind has a dream from start to finish and then wipes it clean, leaving the person to question whether they had a dream at all. And if you ask a person if they had a dream, they’ll say “no,” even though every time a person sleeps, they dream. The memory of it just gets wiped and the person wakes up. Maybe I’m not making much sense here…

If you think of the circle of samsara as an endless stream of dreams, then I think there’s a big problem. You don’t remember your past lives, you’re probably even unsure if you experienced them at all, yet you’re sure that you are experiencing this right now. This moment, this life, you think therefore you are and you’re right here reading this, right? Why do you know you exist, why can you remember this life but none of the others, why are you here? If your memory’s about to get wiped,

shouldn’t you just wake up?

I tried to explain this to a friend and they simply said “well it’s because this is your current life, and you’re experiencing it and when you die you won’t be experiencing it. You’re not remembering anything because this is the present, dumbass.” And for years I haven’t been able to explain why I think something still doesn’t add up. It makes sense from the third perspective like it’s a Matt Damon movie and Jason Bourne will lose his memory and that’s that, but I still have the problem I have everytime I fall asleep; I never remember falling asleep and I seldom remember the dream, I just remember waking up. So, why didn’t you just wake up? If your memory gets wiped after every life, you shouldn’t be in this moment, just like people who have dreams they don’t remember having and assume they never dreamt at all. Why didn’t you just skip over this life like with all your past ones and just wake up? Why do you exist right now?

The only way a person remembers their dream is if they wake up during it. Either after death or a fall or whatever else. So, if you’re experiencing this right now, that means something happens in this life that fucks up your usual cycle. Maybe you figure out nirvana and you become everything. Maybe something jolts your soul out of this life and into something else. However, that something else can’t be another life, because if you die in that one and your memory gets wiped then this existence shouldn’t be a thing. Alternatively, a lucid dream can occur, so maybe consider this your lucid dream flag? Idk if that can even happen? Whatever it is, this is your last life. Something will happen, and you will exit samsara, and your wandering struggle will be over.

Samsara

There’s still some flaws with my logic that I can’t shake. Dreams aren’t exact models for lives, usually in a dream you don’t have a lot of control and your actions sort of seem inevitable. In this life, you’re in control of yourself, right? And you’ve been having memories and memories for years, with near death experiences and everything too, right? Free will is definite, right? With dreams, a person also has to fall asleep to experience it, in lives people just experience it, right? I dunno man, life and death is weird. Maybe samsara is bullshit or maybe I’m full of bullshit. There’s just too many religions, how can any of them be so damn sure they’re right when there’s literally hundreds of millions who say they’re wrong? Each one with views on abortions and gays and slavery and love and hate and whatever else. It’s so weird to me that people believe things just because it’s their religion and “god says so.” I don’t trust like that, and this idea of samsara doesn’t add up for me.

In my dream with the Tonka truck and the snow and the bridge, after that fall, I didn’t wake up. I remember expecting death as I was dropping, staring that ground in the nose knowing this is the last moment, but I didn’t die. And the reason why I ended up asking my friend in person is because I don’t remember waking up. Life’s weird man. If you can point out a flaw in my thinking plz hit me up because this idea has been running amok in my life for ages. Ok bye!