Night Thoughts

If we don't understand life, how can we understand death? -Confucius

A few weeks ago, in the middle of the night I awoke to darkness from a session of sleep so deep that, for all I knew, half an hour might have elapsed since I lay down to bed, or half a century. My state of mind was dreamlike yet alert, and where am I was my first fleeting, unarticulated thought. The moon or a streetlight cast a pale white glow across the room, revealing I was home in my bed, but in the darkness my home seemed an unfamiliar place. Looking around, I could not judge depths nor make out details but only discern the flat shapes and bare outlines of objects, dim yet boldly visible—for my eyes, having less to see, saw everything more. In their vagueness, common items took on uncanny appearances. Overnight, my chest of drawers and bedside lamp and clothes on the floor where I left them had transformed into shadowy blobs and sluggish life-forms in whose presence I felt uneasy, as if they were living out a secret existence while I slept, and only posing by day as my belongings. The clock beside the bed displayed 2:26. I stared for a long minute at the sharp red digits, staring back at me with cold, unblinking steadiness. Amid the shadows and shapelessness of the room, the numbers stood out as an eerie emblem of rationality; their precision and functionality seemed like evidence of a conscious intelligence inside the clock. Suddenly the 6 flicked to 7, as if confirming my suspicion, and without a pause the cold steady stare continued, outlasting my stare. All night this lone watchman had been marking the silent hours, displaying the time for whoever cared to look, or for no one at all. Mortals sleep but their machines stay awake, for they are more steadfast than their makers. I closed my eyes but my brain did not follow cue. As several sleepless minutes passed I felt a growing gnaw of anxiety, like I should not be awake when no one else was, a witness to this inhuman hour. What was I doing in this no-man's-land of time, among blobs and machines? These minutes were not part of either yesterday or tomorrow, were not even entered in the register of human life. At my side my wife lay sleeping, as I should have been, unseen though audibly breathing. Despite her breathing, she did not seem a living being but a portion of the surrounding darkness, which formed a backdrop and contrast to me. Nature and humanity slumbered, and I alone in the silent universe lay awake. I had no body, for my body was buried beneath the covers in blissful comfort that made me forget entirely it was there. I was an abstract mind suspended in an abyss, a pale and glassy eyeball watching the figures my own brain began to trace on the canvas of darkness.

Drifting in and out of half-sleep, suddenly I beheld in front of me, in visible letters, the image of a sentence I had written the prior day as part of an essay. When I had gone to bed the sentence was still too fresh to judge, but now its clumsiness and unsatisfactoriness were plain. I read it again and again with growing dissatisfaction and distress, but I felt paralyzed to alter a single word, and in my paralysis I stared the sentence into a crisis. In my vision of it, there was no surrounding paragraph, no essay in which the sentence was a passing thought. This alone had I ever written, this alone would any reader ever read, so that its mediocrity called my hope of being a writer into grave doubt. How long I lay rereading it I do not know, whether five or fifty minutes, but I felt no boredom from the repetition. I was outside of time, in an eternal now, contemplating my single, ill-written sentence as simply and intensely as God must contemplate creation.

There are day thoughts and night thoughts, the thoughts we think when awake and the thoughts that keep us from our sleep. Day thoughts occur in context, and their context keeps them reasonable. Each idea is checked and balanced by competing ideas. Ne quid nimis is the rule: nothing too much. Night thoughts are monomaniacal and obsessive. Their content is the same, but they lack the context. One after another, the brain sets a single image in the window of consciousness, and each image while it lasts is the only and absolute reality—it is thus that they keep us awake. Night thoughts, I imagine, offer a glimpse into the lunatic's world. For the lunatic sees a single fact or object with such utter lucidity, but also with such utter myopia, that it assumes a false appearance—false, at least, in the judgment of common sense.

I wiggled my toes and twitched my leg muscles and cupped a hand behind my skull, and with these actions my forgotten body rematerialized. I could feel it extending outward from me, a dark lump of flesh, me yet not me. It felt strange to have a body, this bulky apparatus I carry around with me. I can control its outward movements, reposition it if I desire, but the real activity is inside, not only beyond my control but beyond my knowledge. These unseen inner processes keep me alive. The sudden thought of this frightened me, for what assurance was there that the systems might not fail at any minute? I felt my heart beating inside my rib cage, and reflected how it had been beating continuously since my birth, and how, had it stopped even once, I would be dead. I felt amazed that it had worked so dependably for so long, and more amazed that my existence hangs so precariously.

Was it a dream that had woken me from my sleep? It seemed so, but I could not remember the details. Upon waking, I could sense movement around the periphery of my consciousness, a hurried flight and shuffling away, but the center was black. Then the edges went black, and all was quiet. Nevertheless, even an unremembered dream is an oracle. The day before, I had filed my impressions in back cabinets of my mind, and while I slept the magic drawers began opening and shutting of their own accord, and the papers arranging into new and fantastical scripts. I was allowed to watch the spectacle, though powerless to intervene or to guess its significance, but before waking I had to drink from the river Lethe, which had washed me of all but a memory without any content. Who or what was awake inside me while I slept? Freud called it "the unconscious," but it is spurious to name a mystery and thereby tame it into a thing. Leave it unnamed; enough if I know that I am not the lord and sovereign of my own inner kingdom. My cells metabolize without my help; my neurons fire and fantasize without my consent. I am a jobless general riding the shoulders of a self-marching army.

Night thoughts, like dreams, come unbidden, and now my unbidden thoughts took me on a journey of self-observation. Mentally I crept from my body and floated out of the bedroom, a ghostly consciousness, down the dark hallway to the door of my study. The door was closed, but a strip of light shone from under it. I cracked the door and peeked in to see myself sitting at my desk with a book in my hand, reading and studying as I do every day. Then the view shifted, and I was looking down at my house from above. I could see the light coming from the study window, and the houses around mine, and the city where I live, and the land around the city. Normally, living blinds us to the knowledge of our life. We are like actors who, being on stage, cannot watch their own play. But from above, I could see my life in its utter finitude and specificity. I was living this particular life and not another. I had chosen these pursuits, settled into these habits, come to reside in this location. Was it a worthy life to be living? I felt no regret at any specific detail, but I felt trepidation that I was engraving the tablets of my life without knowing it, for there I sat casually at my desk as if the shape my life had taken were as inevitable as an algebraic sum.

I perceived clearly that my familiar repeating pattern of work and play is a bounded series. From the delivery room to the morgue, it is only a short walk down the hallway of life. I imagined myself as an old man, my body falling apart, my days consumed in doctor visits. How could that wretched fate lie down the path of this young, healthy present? Much better if we could endure our decrepitude first, then savor our good years, like wise children who eat their vegetables before dessert and do homework before they play. Instead, after the worse comes the worst. Like the bedroom's palpable darkness against my eyeballs, the thought of death pressed against my consciousness. How long had it been since I last thought of death? It seemed incredible that I had lived in disregard of it for so many weeks or months, though it had not through my inattention ceased to be my destiny. I had been too busy building the clay castle of my life, too busy reading books and, though many of them about death, too lost in their general reflections to think the singular thought that I shall die. It felt strange that everyone must die yet no one knows what death is. The human race has been dying for millions of years, yet I will meet my doom no surer what happens next than the first grunting mortal who fell down dead in the first cave. I thought of my dead grandfathers, impressed as an outsider that they had already been initiated into the mystery. Where did they land when they fell through the wormhole of death? Skeptics scoff at the notion of worlds they cannot see, but only because they lack amazement at the world they can see. Would it be any more surprising to wake after death in some hell or heaven than to have woken on earth at birth, a naked I in this universe of not-I?

Yet, no wonder for skepticism, for familiarity is easy, and ignorance is hard. When I woke the next morning, sunlight was pouring through the slats of the window blinds, my clothes lay in a lifeless heap on the floor, and I could hear the television's mumble-grumble and the whir of my wife's hairdryer coming from the bathroom. I kicked off the sheets, stood up, and stretched my arms, feeling rested and ready for my morning jog, and having forgotten my thoughts and impressions of a few hours earlier. The well-lit world seemed sensible, death was an abstract proposition, and I once again supposed I knew who I am and what I'm doing here.