THE SLEEP OF REASON
Copyright 1995, Paul M. Elliott
There is a saying, I’m sure you’ve heard it: “The sleep of reason begets monsters”
And they want you to think this is a bad thing!
I think that monsters are the reason we sleep.
Only they’re not really monsters.
I don’t know what they are, but they’re trying to tell us something important.
Something about what we think of as reality.

What do you see when you dream?

It’s so obvious that we are trapped here,
and someone or something is sending us signals.
I try to pay attention, but there’s too much noise.
I’m beginning to think that it isn’t just noise, but deliberate interference.
When I sleep, (perchance to dream), I can sometimes hear them breaking through.
I’ve been listening like this a lot lately.

What do you see when you dream?

I think they have placed clues throughout these three dimensions,
but even if you recognize them, you have to decode them.
When I am awake, sometimes I think about numbers.
But when I dream, I dream of irrational numbers.
I think that maybe these numbers, like Pi, are messages to us.
They go on forever.  We just have to break the code.

What do you see when you dream?

I had a dream about decoding Pi.  The answer was beamed directly into my brain.
It involved laminating proteins to create a filter,
a filter that could decode these messages.
It was becoming clearer and clearer, in my dream.
Then the “Oprah” show started blaring through the apartment wall --
And it all evaporated.

What do you see when you dream?

I know I could figure this out, if there just weren’t SO MANY DISTRACTIONS!
Maybe I need to go to the middle of a vast desert,
or the summit of some far-off mountain,
maybe that’s what it takes to escape the constant noise and diversion.
For now, I pull the shades, lock the door, and disconnect the phone.
“An instrument of Satan”, they called it.  I sometimes wonder...

What do you see when you dream?

The so-called primitive people talk about “The Dreamtime”.
They know that our apparent reality is just an illusion.
When you dream, you can glimpse, maybe for a moment, the other side.
I don’t know who is sending me these visions,
these signals I can only dimly perceive when I sleep.
Maybe God, or my future self, or my other self.

What do you see when you dream?

I had a friend once.  He’s dead now.
He thought that a satellite was sending him messages while he slept.
Completely crazy.  Funny thing, though:
In these messages, he learned things that he couldn’t have known any other way.
Me, I don’t know what to think.  I guess I’m hoping for my turn.
You can’t imagine how lonely it’s been, waiting for the signal.