Picture this world for a moment and what appears is people moving in their sleep. Not idle people, and not foolish ones. Busy people, capable people, people getting a very great deal done every single day. They are conscious of their actions in the ordinary sense and could tell you exactly what they did this morning. But in the actions there is no awareness, and those are two entirely different things that we have only one set of words for.
Consciousness belongs to the mind. It notices, records, decides, executes, and it does all of that extremely well. Awareness is something else and it belongs somewhere deeper than the mind. Awareness is knowing what we are doing while we do it, and knowing why, and seeing how it moves through our own life and the lives of the people attached to ours.
Almost nobody has time for that. We are all very busy people. So a person can pass through an entire day, an entire year, an entire lifetime, performing every action correctly and being present for none of them. The record will show a life. There was nobody in it.
What sleep looks like from outside
It does not look like sleep, which is exactly what makes it so hard to notice in anybody. It looks like efficiency. The person furthest from themselves is very often the one who appears most in command, because the whole machine runs considerably better when nobody inside it is asking questions.
It can be told by what happens when the routine breaks. Take the schedule away from somebody who has been sleepwalking well and something close to panic arrives, and it is not about the schedule at all. It is that without the sequence there is nothing to be carried by. A person who has not been present in their own life for fifteen years genuinely does not know what to do with an empty afternoon, and will fill it within the hour.
This is not difficult to observe in oneself either. Days arranged so full that there is no gap anywhere in them, and the arrangement is called productivity, and everybody agrees. What it actually is, seen later, is a very sophisticated method of never being alone with oneself for more than four minutes at a stretch.
Why we prefer it
Sleep is comfortable. That is worth being honest about rather than pretending everybody is secretly longing to wake up, because they are not. Once anybody is awake they have to see things, and among the things they have to see are all the arrangements made while they were not looking, and some of them will be very difficult to look at.
They will see what has been done with their years. They will see which of their relationships are actually alive and which have been running on habit since a point they can no longer locate. They will see what they actually wanted as against what they have been getting, and the distance between those two is not always small and cannot be closed by wishing.
Nobody would choose that on an ordinary Tuesday when nothing in particular is wrong. So the sleep continues, and it is defended quite reasonably, and the person defending it will say truthfully that they simply do not have time for all this. Which is true. And which they arranged.
What wakes people
Almost nobody wakes up on purpose. Something wakes them. An illness, a loss, a failure large enough that the machinery stops running for a while and cannot be restarted quickly. A period of enforced stillness that nobody asked for and nobody enjoys. And in that stillness, all at once, the things that had been waiting quietly for years arrive together.
That is why it is so overwhelming when it comes. It is not that the questions themselves are too hard to answer. It is that fifteen years of them turn up on the same afternoon, and somebody who has been asleep has no practice at all in handling even one. They would have been manageable one at a time, spread out. They are not manageable in a heap.
The distance between awareness and the lack of it is only a moment. That is the strange part and it takes a long time to believe. It is not a long road and it is not a discipline that takes decades to acquire. It is one moment, available at any time, on any day, to anybody. Most of us go a whole life without taking it, because the moment has to be entered, and nobody ever quite has today free.
