The keys, they say, to
a healthy long life is; exercise, diet and sleep. And the greatest is sleep. And not getting hit by a bus. Sleep is the interval of our lives, when we
shut down and rest, for a third of our time on the planet. It is a biological, neurological and metaphysical
reset that we all need. All animals do
it, need it and love it, weather it is day or night. It is what connects us all. Sleep is one of the most intimate things that
we do together, with lovers, spouses, children and pets. It is something we share and connects us thoroughly,
deeply, with each other.
Sleep is also a
very individual exercise. It is a time
for resting our muscles, tissue repair and hormone driven, stress free immune
improvement. It is a cleansing of our
brain of toxins, bad proteins and memories we don’t need. Sleep is a a cosmic car wash of the glymphatic
system with cerebrospinal soap. It is a
time of neuroplastic shrinkage and
consolidation of memory. Our brain works harder during sleep, backing up
the systems, than it does when we are awake.
It shifts smart, short term memory from our hippocampus to our cerebral
cortex for long term storage that constitutes wisdom.We all have intensely
symbolic dream sequences when we sleep that are a dialogue with our own conscious. We have all seen a dog run and yelp in its
sleep and wondered if it was frolicking, flying or fleeing. We all experience similar dream symbols of going
to school naked, to take a final exam, for a class we never attended. Sleep is a primal, psychological blow off
valve where we are most aware, creative and self-conscious.
Sleep is also a
time when we let go of our individual ego, the ‘I,’ the 'fight or flight' focus
of the waking day, and embrace a more universal ‘we.’ As Jung and Freud said, we embrace our
collective consciousness. As Heisenberg
and Einstein infer, we forgo the specific, kinetic, matter-particle functionality
of waking reality and slip into brain wave functions of pure potential. Quantum entanglement suggests a universal
connection and an alternate consciousness and sleep could be the time when our
individual minds plug into the unified field of the universe, beyond space and
time. We are connected threads in a living, breathing cosmos and sleep is the tie that binds us. Sweet Dreams.
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