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.

Breathe in. Feel the stars in the vast open sky at the crown of your head. Breathe out. Feel the stars pouring down into your eyeballs, your throat, your chest, into every cell of your body. Even your bone marrow sparkles 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 brow? Can you feel the neutrinos, quantum particles from farthest galaxies, tumbling into your ancient brain, brushing and healing your hypothalamus with feathers of new-born light?

Can you sense the golden swirl of the Milky Way in your vagus nerve? Those long bright filaments twisting through the arbor of your rib cage, spidering energy-silk that is both consciousness and matter, mind and body. Just lie in the radiant darkness, no longer restless, because you are "doing" exactly what you are supposed to be doing at this moment: sipping from the wellspring of Being.

Is this not your holy work, the work of merely staying awake, and lying here? How many other creatures are doing this work right now, uniting heaven and earth, consciously threading distant suns into the atoms of a neuron? Irradiating flesh with Spirit. Your body glows with awareness. Is this not better than sleep? You are among the precious few who enact this sacrament for all those who sleep.

What pervades your dream? Consciousness. What pervades your waking world? Consciousness. What pervades deep sleep? 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, witnessing your dream, whether awake or asleep, who are you?

One omnipresent and eternal Am takes the momentary form of this little thought called "I." Sometimes the I appears in a dream, and sometimes in the busy marketplace of the waking world. Yet it is the same I, a mere wisp of thought. This I is not who you are. You are the witness of the body, you are the witness of the dream, you are the witness of the I.


The 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 material and immaterial, both particle and wave, depending on how much consciousness you vest in them. Remember this past day, where you went, what you saw. Whither is it now? Does it not have the nature of a dream? This dream dissolves. Each moment of it vanishes as soon as it arises. 


Repose in the Self. Stay in the heart. Let the frolic of the world-dream dance around you, whether you are lying down, sitting up, or walking majestically through the city. Welcome everything and let everything go. Kiss each dissolving form without asking its name. Be the Beloved of All, the promiscuous Self who makes love to All, yet remains untouched, transparent as blue sky in a swirl of clouds.


Are you awake? Are you dreaming? Can you really say, "I Am"? Drop this "I" for just a moment in eternity, and see who you really are. When Am becomes more solid and radiant than a diamond, while the world appears and disappears around it like mist, you are awake.



'Sleeping Buddha' by Giantdesign

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