Suddenly you exist.
Hopefully gently. That’s the best way for it to happen. The slow recede of sleep as it drains away, cascading from your face in a fall of water as you come to consciousness.
Some times it does not. Sometimes it is a shock and a brace and a slap in the face of wakefulness that demands your immediate attention. No, this is not preferable.
Rather instead the subtle velvet caress of cognition. Awareness of your state of being.
Lying flat in the stillness of your mind. Aware of things around you, senses spread wide. You wonder. What is it that has caused you to come awake?
Nothing alarming.
Immediate danger is not apparent.
You simply exist. Again.
Your senses quest, subtle peace in the world. Your eyes remain shut yet you see everything around you through sound and touch and feeling of heart. Eyes aren’t necessary yet.
You sink again, below the threshold of sleep. The surface of that perfect pond of stillness, it rises over you.
Laughter beckons and sweetness fills your mind as you away from the world with the dream, hand in hand.
You smile for awhile, float.
On your back.
Back up and unto the world until you break the surface.
Gently. A moment asleep, a moment awake.
No span or space only subtle differentiation.
Velvet caress and simple existence.
Sense extends. Have you ever heard so much detail in your life?
The clock rooms away. People talking outside. A dog barks up the hill and a car drives by with a bass thumper.
Your mind aware of the existence of all things as dull monotone concept.
How easy it is to know this simple world when we have just come from the land of nod where the mind expands beyond liquid measure. Vivid intensity shines through the eyes shut.
Closer the alarm hums just before the chimes and you bolt upright to slam it off before it can begin.
You crash back down to bed like a breached whale seeking the sanctity of sleep.
Trying in vain to regain that lost visage as you forcefully plunge your mind below the surface of the now turbulent pond. The images distort and the feelings lurch sideways as you swirl in trees laughing happy giddy dappled light of dream slipping away as you cup your hands to drink.
Drip. Drip. You lie in your mind, reconciling reality and dream. Drawing the divide as the perfect pool of sleep settles again, diminished now and unable to overcome you once more.
It’s time to wake for true and face the day in hopes of the return beyond the threshold of sleep.
The perfect still.
For I dream of true.
-j.e. pittman