Waking sleep / Sleepwalking

Our greatest illusion – and the one that’s hardest to give up – is that we live a conscious and deliberate life, that we create our own unique personality, that we are masters of our own choices, that whatever we feel and think is authentically “us” and that we know who we are in all of our fascinating depths and complexities. The condemnation of our lives as a sleepwalker’s trance and the call to awaken has resounded across time, from the old testament to the Buddhist sutras and the revolutionary pamphlets of the last two centuries – but we usually take these statements as merely quaint metaphors. What if our sleepwalking is literal? Every day we rise and fall into automatic routines, we think the same old thoughts, spout the same familiar words, replay our habitual emotional responses, and move with identical mannerisms. But we resist admitting that we dwell in a state of semi-consciousness, like wooden marionettes whose strings are pulled by unseen hands, or that we’re mechanically going through the motions of life without rhyme or purpose. We might feel comfortable to impute this dazed unawareness to others, but not to ourselves. There’s a performative contradiction inherent in it – we cannot know that we are sleeping while asleep.