The Electric Chair

Posting a couple of paras on sleep I'd jotted down while in SPJain. One is something i'd written in a word file, another is something i'd sent out on the intranet instant messaging system.
----------------------------
5th August, 01 5:30 am

Sleep. No, I don’t mean it as the verb form, rather as the noun. What is sleep? Is it a state of not being awake? Or is being awake a state of not being asleep? Stupid question u say, because both are right, and you are right. You are right, because what I'm writing is not a correct representation of what I'm thinking. Lemme try again. What is more real? We say 'ok, I'm going to sleep'. Why don’t we say, ok, I've just woken up? Is it because, wakefulness is a more natural state, and therefore, when we wake up its nothing worth mentioning, but, sleep requires an alteration of the more obvious state of wakefulness? Or is sleep the basic state of existance? Afterall, that is the foremost state of all. Or is it? In the womb is a child awake or asleep? Do words like awake and asleep have any relevance to a half formed being? At any rate new born children sleep near 20 hours, so shouldn’t sleep the more accepted state of being? If so, when, if at all does the changeover in perspective take place. Does the answer depend at all on the number of hours slept?

Why sleep? Not talking about the obvious answers like body needs rest to rejuvinate and if you didn’t u'd have ugly dark circles (arcs!) under your eyes. All that is just the fall-out of not adhering to a system in place. But why is the system in place at all? If one is inclined to believe in God or something remotely resembling this, he by definition didn’t have any constranits in the way of his creations. The system could as well have been bending and touching your toes, or blowing your nose, and your needs of rest and rejuvination would be taken care of. As you see, sleep was not essential in the scheme of things at all. It just does not serve any purpose. When one is asleep one is for all practical purposes, dead. Yeah one has dreams and so on, but that too he knows only when one wakes up. If a person could feel as good, fresh, rejuvinated without sleep the only reason I can imagine a person would want to sleep is either to cherish the memory of dreams or a person who would rather commit suicide but does not have the balls to do so.
----------------------------------------

=====================================
To: Arun-C7[PGP-00-061] (pgp1/BH-029/172.16.30.29)
at Sun Feb 11 04:54:09 2001 (sealed)
-------------------------------------
(first 2 paras to pgp1)
P:: Its 4.20 am.....big deal. Its 4.20 am every day this time. The difference today is that first lecture is at 1130. A long long 420 minutes to while away...arun sarma, who generally holds the same passionate beleifs about nocturnality (is there such a word?) has ditched me to write mails to his "best friends around the globe". Sleep! he says. As if its something that can be made to order. What the hell is sleep? A state in which you are not non-sleeping? A state which u dont know u r in till u abandon it? A state in which u dont know that u exist and therefore u dont? ( I'm sure someone said " i sleep, therefore i am" - just because one is able to distinguish between sleep and non-sleep proves that one is aware of periods when one doesnt know he exists and if he realises later on that he didnt know he existed it means that in fact he exists because such a realisation could come only to a person who exists.

So please, people, i request you to think twice before giving people such facetious advice such as "sleep!" as it may induce them to write such messages about sleep.

# posted by A Chrysanthemum by any other name... : 7:08 AM