From one busy minded individual to another: imagine this.
As you may know, it can be difficult to get an appropriate amount of sleep.
You go to bed, mind swirling with thoughts about what you want to do tomorrow.
Finally, you tire yourself out, and your mind goes blank…
…
And it stays blank.
You of course do not know it. You’re sleeping, of course.
…
Soon, you will start dreaming. You will spend a couple cycles dreaming, some of which you will not remember, some which will mush together to feel as if they were one long dream.
And then it will go blank again.
Eventually, your mind will awaken on its own. Eventually, your mind will stop dreaming, allowing the weight of the world to return you to your senses.
…
But what if it doesn’t?
What if the dreams never come?
…
What if it stays blank?
…
Death during sleep… One of the many terrible endings.
No chance to prepare. No chance to say goodbye.
No chance to reconcile.
The world is your storybook. You wake up everyday to resume your story.
Then, all of a sudden, you cannot read your story anymore. Like a Netflix show canceled mid season… You will never know how the story ends.
What came about with the Second Great War? Did we achieve peaceful independence from our old, floundering empire? Were we able to achieve equality for all and end segregation? What about the new European war? How did that conflict come to an end?
It is a strange construct. Death.
We treat it as a noun. Describe it as we would a person. But this person is different for everyone. They can be hellish, peaceful, elusive, volatile, voracious.
Or we describe it as we would an object, one that is always there. Like the sky, looming over us. But so too is the sky a human invention. A word we assign to a vast space we did not understand or have access to.
And so too can death be imagined this way. A vast space.
Roughly eight years old, as I laid on the floor in a dark corner of the classroom, behind a couch, at the foot of a black projector cart, falling asleep during a classroom nap time…
As my mind drifted, I imagined myself drifting in space. Endless space. Except, there were no stars. There was no sun. This was before we learned about such concepts.
This was an empty room. A pitch black empty room. There were no walls. There was no world. Just a vast, empty void. An endless void. And I was floating there in it. Forever, with no end in sight.
Forever.
… for eternity.
No chance to come back.
No chance to try again.
Floating forever.
A child’s imagination of death.
I would wake up, and wonder if that was all I had to look forward to. Every novelty I had access to now. Gone in a few years.
It’s no wonder we mask it with our own stories. No one knows for certain, anyway, so what difference does it make if we use one storybook or another?
Until your storybook conflicts with another’s.
Years later, that childhood imagination does not represent itself with the same simplistic and naive manner. Yet the idea itself still resurfaces in the minutes leading up to sleep. It can lead to a creative churn of endless thoughts, linking from one idea to another. Ideas I feel compelled to write down, or at least cycle repeatedly so that I’ll remember them tomorrow morning, leading to a sleepless night.
Why is it that going to sleep is one of the most golden hours of creativity? Hours that should be spent doing something else: winding down to sleep, where the storybook is taken away from me, however brief a time it may be. But as I do, and I’m sure as many do, I cannot help but worry every once in a while the book might not return.
It’s as if death is the ultimate driver of creativity. Of purpose. Of ambition. Or of any construct. If there’s anything I learned in these few years with humanity, any decision, idea, no matter if it makes logical sense or not, is driven by this storytelling element. The drive for a favorable and conclusive ending.
Death drives the world forward. To finish their storybook before it is taken away from them.
And that is as true today as it ever was.
(writing in progress)