Sleep Walkin’ or Doin’ Time

Random Unfinished Thoughts…

…Most of life goes by like a late night movie watched while sprawled out half asleep on your couch with the lights off.  It takes on a dreamlike quality, edges blurred and the details fuzzy.  You have a vague nagging sense that something important is transpiring, but you seem distant, detached and far removed from it.

Medicated or mediated, we do our time as days drop off like autumn leaves, unnoticed until perhaps they completely obscure the ground beneath us.  It’s all so disorienting at times that life can feel like a movie we’ve entered in the middle of, it’s confusing and difficult to figure out who the heroes and villains are.  Who can you trust?  Who should you stay far away from.

Many walk this life with all the awareness of a sleepwalker; experiencing only sporadic moments of cognition; usually only after we are rudely jostled from our smugness of our “wooly cotton brains of infancy¹ “, by one of life’s myriad of tragic events…a death, an illness, a break-up, loss of work, natural disaster or whatever the latest man’s inhumanity to man which is currently in vogue.  For a fleeting instant; time stops; as reality invades our protected habitat, which we’ve created, like a belligerent uninvited dinner guest. For that moment, we become fully cognizant; self-aware; the thin veneer of our carefully crafted safe dream world fades and we discovered that the facade is precariously being held up with decaying 2 x 4s, crudely hammered nails and duct tape…

1 – James Morrison, “Awake Ghost Songs” – An American Prayer.