What To Do When You Can't Sleep

 Are you awake? Are you dreaming? Who is the dreamer?

Lying in your bed after midnight, unable to sleep, why worry about the difference between dreaming and waking? Just assume that your body is getting the rest it needs. Don't try to sleep, any more than you would try to stay awake. You don't need more sleep. You need more Being.

Feel the stars pouring their rays into every cell of your body. Even the marrow of your bones is sparkling with their distant light. Can you feel the moon pulse soft pearls into your pineal gland, deep in the back of your head, streaming them out into your forehead, and tumbling quantum particles down into your ancient brain, bathing your hypothalamus with soft healing fingers. Feel the intergalactic golden swirl of the Milky Way in your vagus nerve, those long bright filaments twisting through the arbor of your rib cage, a spidering energy that is both consciousness and matter, mind and body. Now just lie here, no longer feeling restless, because you are doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing right this moment: Being. Is this not this holy work, the work of merely lying here, awake? How many other creatures at this moment are doing this work, uniting heaven and earth, threading the most distant suns into anatom in a neuron? Feel your flesh irradiated with Spirit. Your body glow with awareness. Is this not better than sleep?

What pervades your dream? Consciousness. What pervades yourwaking world? Consciousness. Why do you insist that waking is so different from dreaming? A dream arises and dissolves, the world arises and dissolves. When you lie here in your bed, unsleeping, who are you? One single Am takes the momentary form of a thought called "I." Sometimes this I appears in a dream, and sometimes in the busy marketplace of the waking world. Yet it is the same I.  You are the witness of the body, you are the witness of the dream. You are the witness of the mind having this thought. And you are the witness of sleep.

The same witness dips in and out of sleep like a dolphin playing in the phosphorescent waves of night. Phantoms appear and dissolve on the edge of sleep, the world appears and dissolves on the edge of waking. These phantoms are both solid and not solid, both real and unreal, depending on how much energy and consciousness you vest in them. Remember this past day, where you went and what you saw. Where are they now? Did your day not have the nature of a dream? The dream has dissolved, and each moment of it was gone as soon as it arose. 

Stay in the heart. Repose in the Self. Let the frolic of the world dream its dance around you, whether you are lying down or sitting up or walking majestically through the city. Welcome everything. Let everything go. Kiss each form you encounter without asking its name. Be the promiscuous Self who makes love with All, yet remains untouched, transparent as blue sky in a swirl of clouds. Thus the great Gnostic hymn, "Thunder Perfect Mind," declares: "I am the Virgin and I am the Whore."

Are you awake? Are you dreaming? Who is the dreamer?