OneAndOneIs2

I've been tired all week. Not in a sleepy way - in a "Brain-telling-me-I'm-overworking-it" way.

It's meditation's fault.

I haven't really said much about meditation thus far, but I figured now was as good a time as any to go into it.

There are myriad connections between the mind and the body. Meditation is just another way of taking advantage of them: Relaxing the mind relaxes the body, relaxing the body relaxes the mind. If you've ever had a massage, or even just a nice hot bath, after a stressful day, you're probably already aware that relaxing physically automatically leads to relaxing mentally as well: An example of the mind-body link.

Meditation builds upon this link. Essentially, meditation is no more than keeping your mind clear and alert. Clearing the mind stops you dwelling upon stress-inducing thoughts. The body, receiving no stress signals from the mind, relaxes. The mind follows the body and enters a very relaxed state. The difference between a relaxed meditative state and a relaxed-from-a-hot-bath state is that, in the former, the mind is fully awake and alert; whereas in the latter, the mind becomes sleepy and dull.

The difference is important: If one's alertness relaxes along with the body, the mind and body remain in synch. As the body relaxes, the mind becomes unfocussed and falls asleep along with the body. It never becomes fully-relaxed, because past a certain point, relaxation = unconsciousness. But if instead one remains fully alert, the synchronization is broken: The body relaxes towards sleep, and the mind relaxes with it, but instead of dwindling sleepily as usual, it stays fully alert and experiences a far more relaxed state than is normally possible. Thus both mind and body relax far more than either usually would, which has health benefits for both.

Eventually, full waking alertness can actually be carried into the sleep state. This seems oxymoronic to many at first: "You can't be awake and asleep, any more than it can be light and dark at the same time," they say. But you can, because the mind and body are separate: It is perfectly possible for the body to be asleep while the mind is awake. This is demonstrated clearly by dreams: How else can one characterise a dream, if not as a state in which one is both awake and asleep simultaneously?

Other half-and-half states are well-documented. Sleeping paralysis, for example: The brain actually dissociates from the body during sleep. After all, you wouldn't want to dream of running across a field, only to wake up in agony because you just kicked the bedside table.

Waking up mentally while your body is still asleep often leads to paralysis: This is, in fact, a popular explanation for alien abduction experiences - waking paralysis leading to an abduction dream so vivid it seems real.

People who claim that you can always tell a dream from reality don't know much about dreams. A normal dream, sure enough, is easy to tell from reality: You enter it from a fully-asleep state, and rarely even wake up enough to realize that you are dreaming. Sleepily, you blunder through a bizarre world, too dull-witted to appreciate the situation.

A lucid dream is different: You wake up enough to know it is a dream. I've had a fair number of these. They're usually short-lived: It's an unusual state to be in, and usually you're not awake enough to really do anything worthwhile.

However, I've had one or two LD's where I not only woke up enough to know it was a dream, but woke up enough to truly understand what it meant. In one, just one, I had what was so close to full waking consciousness that I was actually unable to end the dream by trying to wake up, because I was already fully awake. That dream lasted several minutes.

LDs are actually a big part of what interests me about meditating: They're very cool to experience, but they aren't easy to induce, and usually too vague to enjoy even when they do happen. It's a different story when you can enter the dream-state from a wide-awake start instead of a fast-asleep one though: You don't have to struggle to wake up enough, because you're wide-awake from the word 'Go'.

I meditate at lunchtime. I have done so every weekday (barring holidays) for about a year and a half. I still can't get quite as far as I want to. The state I can reach is a halfway-house: It's near enough to sleep that dreams pop-up, but too fragile to sustain them for more than a few seconds.

As far as I can tell, this is akin to the drifting-off state: If you've ever been on the verge of falling asleep when a sudden noise wakes you, you'll know the one. The same noise minutes earlier wouldn't have disturbed you, you'd have been wide-awake. The same noise minutes later wouldn't have disturbed you, you'd have been fast asleep. But in that fragile in-between. . .

I believe I'm getting near to being able to sustain the state long enough for my body to fall completely asleep, which I understand is a far more stable state, as well as being a blissfully relaxed one. But I haven't quite reached it yet.

Which brings me back to where I started: Why I'm tired this week. Simply put, it breaks the habit of a lifetime to try and stay awake while you go to sleep. The mind isn't used to staying alert. Even in normal day-to-day living, we frequently become less-than-fully-alert. A state of boredom is the most common one: It makes you feel lethargic and non-energetic, because your mind is partly-asleep while your body is wide awake. Simple day-dreaming is another mind-dozy, body-awake state.

To meditate successfully, you need to flip this lifelong habit around, and get used to being mentally-awake at all times. So all week, I've been refusing to let my mind drift, to daydream, to become lethargic. It's paid off well in meditation, letting me see and hear dream events in a matter of minutes. But it's tiring as well. I'm hoping that it gets easier with practice: Kind of like building up mental muscles :o)