Twice in the past week I’ve experienced the same sense of having a basic insight while in the process of falling asleep. Of course, thoughts that form while the brain is in that transitional state are difficult to communicate under the harsh glare of our ridiculously high waking-life standards for “making sense” and “meaning anything.” But the particular sleepy thought that I had twice this week is actually about thought, and about sleepy thought in particular – and I’ve been able to remember it, unlike most of the brilliant thoughts I have in the middle of the night and then lose forever. So here it is, dressed up as though it’s a poetic thought rather than a sleepy one.

When we’re falling asleep, our thoughts do not necessarily become more muddled or less intelligent, they merely break down into their constituent parts; these molecules of thought become less sticky and float by one another detachedly, combining, if at all, into only the simplest structures. This is a limitation on the sophistication of thought, but it also offers a certain clarity. One thinks of things only insofar as they can be perceived as conceptual atoms, like the indivisible objects on flash cards: rope, apple, ladder, house. The image I had was of a configuration of overlapping straight lines that approximated a curve. In waking thought we think in terms of the illusory curve, but in that crippled state of half-sleep, the mind can see only the straight lines. The curve is metaphor and implication; the curve is the world of half-truth that we live in, and falling asleep I felt wonderfully free of it.

You might well point out that my mind was using a visual metaphor in the course of praising itself for having freed itself of metaphor. Actually, it’s unlikely that you’ll point that out because I doubt that anyone has any idea what I’m talking about here. But no matter; I just wanted to record this while I was still able to recall any of it.

There were much larger implications to the thought, at the time, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to recover them very well. I think – can surmise – that the rest had to do with seeing life for what it is, without trepidation… facing human mortality and insignificance with clarity, freed of the imaginary, implied curves that seem to make them unbearable by day.

My waking-self commentary on all this is that I recognize it as being typically googly falling-asleep thought and, nonetheless, also not untrue. I am moved and grateful to think that there is any moment in my life, waking or otherwise, where I am capable of feeling that I have thought my way into a geometric clarity that dispels the fear of death. You’d be hard pressed to prove that I was “wrong,” after all, so why not?

Also, in a more earthbound connection, I stand by the general observation about the detached/crystallized nature of thought while falling asleep. I have noticed on many occasions that I perceive and parse music with greater clarity and fluency when I am falling asleep, and Beth recently reported the same experience. It’s as though my mind, having given up the task of investigating implications, is freed to devote itself entirely to manipulating the surface of what it hears; I feel particularly ready to grab on to, say, a melody, and recognize and enjoy it as itself. My intuition tells me that this has something to do how my brain is allocating the resources of its linguistic component. I vaguely remember reading some science article long ago about how the sophistication of human visual processing somehow evolved from a part of the brain that originally served a language-related function. Maybe I have that completely backward or maybe I invented it. Anyway, the idea that our visual thought is somehow quasi-linguistic has an intuitive appeal to me, and this feels like a related phenomenon – like the language unit has been given free rein with all the thoughts; or maybe the opposite, that the language unit has shut down and the thoughts are let loose to be themselves. Though, regarding the experience with music, it definitely feels like my brain is reading the music like language and deriving the same sort of immediacy of meaning from it.

Anyway, I thought it would be a nice gift to my falling-asleep brain, who is in some ways a slightly different person from me, to post his thoughts on the internet and thus give him a sort of foothold in the real world. Although he would probably take issue with the patronizing implication that his world isn’t the real world.

But for better or for worse, I get all the mail. This argument seems pretty solid to me. I’ll check in with him and let you know if he has a rebuttal.

Have I just typed something absolutely incoherent? I have the strange snaky sense that I have finally gone and blown my nose all over the internet. But I guess that’s the sort of looseness I’ve been working toward all along here. I feel remarkably disengaged from any kind of shame about this, which is exciting in its way. The question is: in the absence of shame, what will motivate quality-control? I think that I (and others) tend to feel rather invested in vigilant shame as a crucial element of personal upkeep. In my case I’ve finally come around to accepting that it’s more of a hindrance than an asset, but if I’m to become shameless, is there no way to avoid becoming shameless? One wants to establish a mechanism for self-improvement independent of shame. Harder than it sounds. Maybe some shame is a necessity. But, if I’ve really managed to erase it, it’s entirely unobvious where to redraw that line.

The title of this entry, if you hadn’t noticed, has a double meaning. Possibly a triple meaning.