With age, I am beginning to realize, comes an increased inclination for us to sleep like babies. We squirm around, we whine, we need to pee and poop, and no sooner than we wake up, we want to eat and finally nap. Given this unfortunate reality we devise strategies to confront our golden age insomnia. My own ploy is fan, temperature, and iPad based. The fan circulates a breeze of no more than say, 65 degrees. The iPad is my answer to “white noise” that some friends and family address with an actual fan, or garden fountain. I have an app on my iPad called NatureSpace: Holographic Audio, which has dozens and dozens of audio tracks - crickets, cicadas, streams, waves, storms, rain, trains, etc., etc., etc. You name it and it is probably there. Now the cool thing about NatureSpace is that you can “blend it with other apps.” Like your favorite music app, like Pandora or whatever. So I confront my golden age insomnia with a variety of audio blends - classical violins and gentle rain, piano and distant trains, and other possibilities almost endless.
And what you may well ask, does my better half think of this? Well, headphones seemed a good option for awhile, but failed to address the: “Hey! You are snoring!” “I don’t snore! You snore!” “No I don’t!” “Tape me!” "Tape You!" debate. Which often leads to the age appropriate luxury of different bedrooms. Yes, it is true. When the kids finally move out you don’t only lose all that laundry, you also gain an additional bedroom or two. But I digress.
So, I asked myself, what soporific environment am I trying to create with my iPad/fan/temperature manipulation? A number of childhood memories eventually came drifting back. In the summer we kids would occasionally sleep out on the screened-in porch. The best nights had breezes, rain, even an occasional storm. Similarly, most summers the family would vacation at “cabin number 12 in the pines” at Tower Hill Camp on the shores of Lake Michigan. There too, we kids would bunk in the screened-in porch. Breezes in the pines, occasional rain showers. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that those sleep-inducing nights had followed me throughout my life; as a camper and then a counselor at scout camp in Ohio, as a counselor at a treatment ranch for “emotionally disturbed" 5 or 6 year-olds - my “itsy-bitsy-skitsies” - in Northern California, Scout camp in Austria. Nights with cool breezes, out in nature. Further, I came to realize that my current nighttime meditations would often send me drifting to those calming places and spaces. Sometimes inhabited, but just as often not. But I have recently come to understand that my “beat the insomnia” ritual is probably about much more than temperature and sound. It is about Harmony and the porous nature of existence.
Let me try to explain. Those perfect sleeping environments held no expectations for the future - those nights were somehow isolated in space and time. Perhaps the many worlds of spacetime? Floating? Harmonic? Protected? I’m not sure how to express it, They made the world go away? Or maybe made the world harmonic?
Which of course brought me back to Distilled Harmony. Back around 2000, in The God Chord: String Theory in the Landscape of the Heart, I asserted that the unique “string” vibrations in our unique DNA determined the “chord” that defined us, and further determined whether we were in "harmony" or "discord" with the world in which we found ourselves at any particular point in time. People, places, sights, sounds, everything. We either hummed along harmonious in that moment of existence, or there were a lot of those “fingernails on the blackboard” moments - discord. Over the intervening years I have distilled those observations down to the four tenets of Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm. It strikes me that my iPad and the fan moments are an obvious attempt to create at least some portion of those drowsy, soporific moments. But it further occurs to me that there may be more to it than that.
I remain intrigued with what seems to be the various special qualities of different types of sleep. Why am I writing again here in tiny hours of the morning, knowing that even with my iPad and fan properly coordinated, were I to blank my screen and set the heating pad on low - did I mention the heating pad? - sleep would still be an hour or more away. Yet, in mid-afternoon I can lay down my colored markers, and barely make it to my bed before sleep - often accompanied by technicolored dreams - overwhelms me. No doubt a neurologist would offer an insightful medical explanation. Or a psychologist who would explain that I am still caught in a childhood mandate that I “should” sleep at night or Santa won’t come or whatever. While nap time is a time when I, as a retired adult with no lectures to prepare or research to pursue, can simply choose to sleep and hence do. Could well be the case. But I am still more interested in what happens after I get to sleep, regardless of how I got there. Which is probably why I put so much effort in creating the ideal sleeping environment.
I am fascinated with the relationship between sleep and the “many worlds/quantum mechanics” issues I have mentioned here before. You see it seems quite reasonable to me that when we sleep - and the sleep scientists might provide some insight here as to when this might occur - we might well slip over the boundaries, perhaps through a personal "wormhole" between our many worlds and spend a little time in one of our alternative “worlds not chosen.” Neat idea, not?
So I am beginning to think of dreams, less as “dreams” and more as "quantum clusters" - sort of like cosmic candy bars, maybe mental mints. They are, it seems reasonable to assume, unique otherworldly manifestations of Harmony, as reflected in the four tenets of Distilled Harmony. Physicists tell us, although with less certainty it seems these days, that the laws of physics should manifest themselves consistently throughout the universe - as we know it. It seems no less likely to assert that the tenets of Distilled Harmony are equally far-flung, with those very real seeming, hi-res, multicolored dreams being supportive data points.
Now, if I could only remember them better.
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