Repost.

This is a recycled version of something at least one person already read. I'll add in new material to keep it fresh, but I liked a lot of it before. Most of it will be the same.

I've been talking a lot about dreams with people recently. Sleep is oddly satisfying, though it seems to me that I only get it in bursts anymore. 5 hours of sleep is considered a full night's worth --- for me anyway. My sleep schedule for the past two days? In bed by four thirty, just before the sun starts to peek out at the houses. Awake by eight. Stay up long enough to wreck the place. Back to sleep until eleven. Wake up, get dressed, drive to school, sleep walk for four hours. Drive home. Dinner at five, nap until six. Work at eleven, home by six, sleep until ten. Here I am.

I love sleeping because it comes so naturally now. There was a time I would go days without sleeping; as many as three or four at a time. It would always seem like longer. All the days and colors would start to blend together and my eyes would sag. Everything felt like it was second hand; like I was experiencing an echo of life, somehow. Now, sleep comes when I ask it to. I can sleep on command. Lay on my left side, count to fifty. Roll to my right, count to forty. Lose focus, regain focus, roll back to the left, flip my pillow, close my eyes, and sleep. Like the combination to a lock.

I wonder if where I am in the world has any effect on my dreams. South, at noon on a beach, when my pillow is damp with sweat, and my skin is crisp in the sun. North, at midnight in a snow storm, when my blanket cocoons me against prying cold, reaching to separate my bones.

Sometimes, just before I fall asleep, I imagine the world as a giant glass eye, that reflects us into space. I imagine that we are really something greater than layers of skin draped over feeble skeleton. That we are reflected so minusculely that something ital becomes lost in the translation. That maybe we are stars, or something greater than stars, compressed to an infinitesimally smaller size. The concept of being transferred into dust and sound; slowly resonating vibrations. And maybe dreaming is the appeal to our potential --- a state where we no longer have to negotiate the delays of time and distance.

Our minds are made up of principally the same things. We are all built from the same moving parts, and if I were to lay out on a table all the brains of all of your loved ones, you would not be able to separate one from the next. They are all just masses of cells; concentrations of atoms to make tissues and fluids. The firing of electrical signals. Atoms. Electricity. These things have tendencies, and maybe that is why we all have such common experience. We're all thinking the same things at some point or another, so what is the dividing line between where we are and collective consciousness? If space is nothing, and all that is between stars is space, then there is nothing between the stars. So do they touch? If space is all that separates my thought from yours, are they touching?

I had a dream about a girl who I never met. We were sitting on a bed that was mine, but wasn't, in a room that was mine, which I had never been in. I could see out into the neighborhood that was somehow familiar and completely foreign to me, and everything was comfortable. We sat indian style on the mattress and the covers pooled around our hips and touched my waist like ocean waves. She had a face I can't remember, but would recognize. A white cardigan, and a shirt which matched her dark-rimmed glasses. Green eyes behind corrective lenses. Shafts of light came through the window and landed on my lap. She said she could teach me to play the violin, and I told her I could bring her summer time. This all felt oddly heavy. I was in love with her.

When I woke up it occurred to me for the first time in my life that was I dreaming about someone I had never seen, or met, or heard of. I realized that this person was or will be real, almost certainly. Somewhere, sometime this girl is real. All of the people I have ever dreamed about are potentially real people with experiences and thoughts, and ideas, and lives entirely their own. But how do I know them well enough to visualize them? How can these people be real to me in dream, but not in consciousness?

Do they dream about me?

For the majority of my life I recognized dreams as arbitrary. Every dream was like an episode of Will and Grace; controversial, but mundane. Forgettable. Unimportant. My friends say they don't dream anymore, but I think that they just don't remember. One of them said that this blogging thing sometimes feels like talking to god. I sort of feel like maybe dreaming is like god casually talking back.

I watched waking life, once. I feel asleep, which I find some irony in. It was the most self-indulgent movie I have ever watched, and I hated every second of it.