Are you asleep or awake? What about people you interact with daily? Most will answer that they are awake and those around them are awake as well. It’s a simple question with an easily determined answer, or so it seems.
Not all is as it seems. Rather than two states of being, there are at least four. The mind and body can be asleep or awake independently of each other.
With mind and body awake, one is truly awake. With mind and body asleep, one is dreaming. With mind awake and body asleep, one is lucid-dreaming. With mind asleep and body awake, one is sleepwalking. Gradations exist between these four states, ranging from hypnotism and trance to daydreaming and dim consciousness.
The common understanding of what it means to be “awake” disguises the truth. In truth, most who call themselves awake are actually not awake at all. They are either hypnotized, dimly conscious, sleepwalking, daydreaming, or in a state of trance. What all these states have in common is that the conscious core of the individual is absent or passive, blowing like a leaf in the winds of environmental stimuli.
Waking Dreams
We dream while physically asleep. But for many, dreams do not end in the morning. Getting up, showering, eating, working, watching TV—all those are continuations of a dream state that remains essentially uninterrupted, 24 hours a day.
You may realize how in dreams our sense of reality is disabled and we submit our attention to the most ridiculous dramas and scenarios. In dreams, we make the strangest “logical” associations that amount to no logic at all, have little say in what happens to us, do things impulsively, and never question our reality or observe ourselves.
Because people tend to be mentally asleep while going about their daily business, they carry out exactly the same behavior. All that limits them is the stability of their physical environment. Nevertheless, they are just as easily suggestible, capable of false logic, and in passive submission to the environment as during their nightly dreams.
Observe what people do and say, the anecdotes and gossip they speak, how they may communicate via recitations of lines from movies or TV shows, speak in trite memetic phrases without conscious thought or originality, engage in ludicrous programmed behavior, engross themselves in petty dramas, and switch to goofy or borrowed personalities that you never question—as long as you are asleep.
The world and society is an insane asylum, but everyone is too asleep to notice the insanity. Just as you may not question insane dreams while having them, so do most people not question their insane lives. But, if you observe yourself, return your focus of attention to your present location and moment in time, then observe those around you with this perspective, you will see that they are virtually sleepwalking. Ever wish you could observe another person’s dreams? Well, your wish is granted – just observe others and you will see them behaving exactly as they would in dreams, were their dream environments as stable as this physical one.
The moment you forget yourself and become fully absorbed in what you perceive, you are no longer awake. You have forgotten about your own consciousness and are in a hypnotic trance focused entirely upon the object of your thoughts or perceptions. At that point, your freewill is surrendered and you become a machine, input and output determined by what enthralls you.
The implications of mass somnambulism is obvious. With billions of people asleep, those in power who are awake have the advantage. Sleeping people are easily controlled. Their conscious core exists within a mental prison, harnessed for time, labor, and energy. They possess little or no freewill because they have abandoned the awareness necessary to utilize it.
