Sleep Walking
by Clark Zimmerman, LAc.
I have a ritual of sneaking into my daughter’s room before I settle into bed for the night. I make sure the covers are just right, give her a kiss on the cheek and say a little prayer for sweet dreams. For a long time, she would coo and roll over, continuing on her dream time journeys. The past few months though, she has roused from slumber when I kiss her, and she begins speaking a sort of incoherent drivel, or shares a little snippet of a dream. Often times she sits up in a state of confusion and starts moving around, looking for something to pull her back into the gentle spell of sleep. On the most amusing nights, she walks out into the family room before the good-night kiss and starts telling mom and I jumbled stories of far-away lands. When this phase began, we didn’t realize she was still sleeping, so we tried to follow her logic. We soon figured out that she was walking and talking in her sleep. This is the nature of being asleep: Sometimes it is deep and restful; other moments it is fitful and unsettled.
Dreams can seem so realistic. We can believe that we are awake and conscious, but oftentimes this is a trick of the mind. We can notice this when we are in the middle of a powerful, convincing dream, such as a dream where we are falling. The experience can seem so real that we feel it in the pit of our stomach, like we are riding a roller coaster. Even though it is not happening, the mind and body can believe that the dream is real. When we sleepwalk, we are acting out a dream. In Chinese medicine, we say that when we sleepwalk, the soul becomes unrooted in the body, and the body moves on its own without the oversight of conscious awareness.
When we are asleep and dreaming, we often don’t realize that we are asleep until we awaken. We all have likely experienced the relief when we wake up from a nightmare, with our heart racing, and realize that we were asleep. In many spiritual traditions, they describe an unaware person as being asleep. We may think that we are awake and in control, but so many parts of us may not be conscious. We mistakenly believe that we are our thoughts and emotions, our desires and our pain. We may even believe things that may be absolutely untrue. We fall into a world of illusion that seems so real that it affects every part of our experience.
The world’s problems are, by and large, human problems-the unavoidable consequence of egoic sleepwalking. If we care to look, all the signs are present to suggest that we are not only sleepwalking, but at times borderline insane as well.
Adyashanti
Like my daughter speaking nonsense, or looking around in confusion when she is half asleep, we all can fall into a place where we are not present. We can become so caught up in the illusions of the mind that we react to situations, rather than living in the moment with clear perception and intention. This is usually when we get into trouble. We say things or make decisions we later regret. This is why it is so important to practice waking up. Like a fish that doesn’t realize it is swimming until it is out of the water, we often don’t notice that we are unconscious until we begin to wake up. The practice of meditation and contemplation are transformative tools that show us where we may be unconscious and reacting to life. Just as we exercise our bodies and sharpen our memory, we must hone our ability to become more aware.
Lately, I have taken to blowing my sleeping daughter a kiss goodnight from her bedroom door so as not to wake her up. I let her move through her dreams uninterrupted. Then in the daytime, we work on becoming more fully awake. For the nighttime is for sleeping and the waking hours are for waking up and living a present life.