Questions With No Answers: Exploring Sleep, Death & Reality | Bucks Insights

I hope this lands delicately well, like a dessert after what we cooked last week. That juicy steak—I'm still salivating thinking about it. If you’re vegetarian, picture a crisp carrot snapping in half.

I don't quite understand sleep, and quite frankly, I don't like it. It's one of those things that you must do, and there's no way around it. It's an uncomfortable transition.

I have wondered before if it's the same feeling as death. Beyond that sleep curtain, there is a whole lot of other experiences and lives that one gets to assume and experience once they have passed over. So if it is indeed like death, then it's safe to assume that there is life after death. The question then becomes, "do we have control over our dreams?" In this case I'm referring to dreams in a literal sense, not the pursuits.

I have had dreams that felt like they were not happening for the first time. You know that feeling of having a déjà vu feeling in a dream? Like, you know the surroundings, you know what's happening, and sometimes you even wonder how you ended back there again. But I'm also thinking now if it is really the same place, or if it's just a perspective that we are looking at it from.

I remember when I was growing up, there was a tree that I always thought was the same tree that I remembered seeing when I was much younger, and I thought if I could go beyond that tree, I could go back to that time. But I realized when I grew older that it was the wrong tree. Had I gone beyond that tree, I would've likely been eaten by wild animals.

There is darkness that needs to happen before sleep occurs, by ultimately shutting off your eyes. I have recently realized that when we wake up, you first arrive to your body, then get conscious, then realize that you are awake, and open your eyes. Eyes emit light, and you'll see that it starts a bit blurry and it sharpens the brightness until you see clearly.

What if the whole place is dark, and it's the light from our eyes that gives it light?

Giving In and Letting Go

The reason why sleeping feels uncomfortable for me is that feeling or process of giving in and letting go. Giving in and letting go—the two things I struggle with the most in life, until I'm right at the end, when I'm basically “dying”,into sleep. It always gets me by surprise. I would never be able to tell you the exact time I fall asleep.

There is no telling of what happens on the other side. But it's amazing to have managed to escape to the other side. You know when you are not able to fall asleep, which is often because you feel like you have a lot of unfinished business in this lifetime. Because in this case, a day we can look at as a lifetime, because we don't know whose body you're going to be carrying tomorrow. You know some days you wake up in a tired and overused body, and sometimes you wake up in an athlete's body.

If I could learn to program myself to teach myself to let go as soon as possible, I reckon my life would be much more at ease.

What can I say, it’s the fear of death. The paradox is that sometimes the harder you fight against something, the more you subconsciously aide it to win against you. If you are fighting against sleep for example, because of avoiding that terrible dying feeling, you are also adversely affecting your health which will eventually lead to death.

I even get anxious when bedtime is approaching. I like nighttime, except the sleeping part. I do it because I have to do it for health reasons.

Time Slot

You know when you are job hunting at factories or informal job recruiters' offices, you get there and you wait with other groups of people also waiting for the job for that day. You have no idea what job you are going to get that day, or if you are going to get a job that day. Time is important in these places. The earlier you get there, the better your chances at getting something and something better. You'd be sitting there and waiting, but there is no guarantee that you are going to get something or at what time.

You can get there at 06:00 and immediately find something—they were just missing one person, and that's you. Sometimes you can get there at 06:00 and only get something in the afternoon, and get the worst kind, like unloading a 12-meter container filled with 60kg manure sacks in 35 degrees Celsius heat. Inside the metal container, it's more like 40 degrees Celsius. Two men unloading this thing, fingers bleeding as you are picking up these sacks out of the container. You have to keep going. You are working with a guy that specializes in this. It's like you are a potato inside the pot, getting cooked.

Same thing with sleep. Sometimes I get to bed and fall asleep shortly after, and sometimes I stay for hours before I can get a glimpse, and even that one glimpse feels synthetic. When was the last time you had sleep and you wake up the following morning, your mind is disoriented a bit? For like a few seconds you are not sure where you are?

Sometimes you will sleeping with a snorer. Sometimes you might be sleeping next to the airport or next to the busy highway.

Sometimes, even after sleeping, you feel like you haven't slept a wink. Because you didn't fully let go. You were fighting the fights of this lifetime instead of letting go. If only it was that easy.

Sleep and Death

I once drowned for a few seconds. I missed a step and got into the violent river.

Before the drowning, my spirit was severely beaten down to the point that anything would've taken me. The rock I was stepping on tilted over, and I was under the water. For a moment, I felt a different kind of peace, until I started getting hit by the rocks, and I realized that this was not going to be as peaceful as I thought it would be. And I got out.

You know when we learn swimming, the first thing is to learn to hold your breath under the water. And it's a nice practice when you are busy practicing as kids. Until you get to learning to regulate your balance on top of the water, through the water, and under the water.

I've recently gotten a thought about holding your breath under the water. What if this is not actually holding your breath, but learning to breathe under the water—not through your nose for obvious reasons like inhaling water? What if you can still manage to breathe through your skin pores and through the water?

When you are still learning to do this, at first you hold your breath for a long time, until you forget about it. When I jump in the water, I hardly think about water coming inside my nose.

So is it holding your breath, or learning to regulate your breathing under water?

When I was a kid, someone in the family was severely hurt by bad people. The elders were angry that he didn't see his friend who pretended to be dead. The bad people left him, and they took him and threw him in the dumpster thinking that he was dead. This is another skill—the level of deception for survival.

The truth is we all die at some point. You might not die completely, but your spirit can be so hurt that it sees no point in fighting anymore, and to save it from any more pain, you just let go. It's not an easy thing to do. The pain of looking at your soul, body, or heart severely damaged, beyond the point of repair. Obviously, this point is subjective. We have seen some people coming back from the point beyond repair. Perhaps you yourself have experienced a moment where either your body, soul, or heart—or all three at the same time—were severely damaged, and you came back. This is what I've recently decided to call death. When you leave the body eternally, of course. If it's just a few hours, we call it sleep.

Another truth that I can't argue against is the fact that in order for something new to be born, something old must die. This means that death is important for something new. The question comes: what is more important, death or something new? Because this goes in succession.

The other question is, if you die in this lifetime and you leave your body here, what happens with your life in dreams? That life was not based in this body. You have experienced other lifetimes in different bodies in your dreams. Is it possible to jump into one of those and assume one of those lives?

There is a saying: "Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die."

Language Barrier

I can go with my problems into my dreams and solve them on the other side of sleep—the dreamland. And I get these resolved perfectly. Until I come back to this side. You would know if you ever wet your bed when you were a kid.

You'd wake up feeling happy that finally you've gotten a breakthrough in your problem. But when it's time to apply that perfect solution to the problem you are facing when you wake up, it doesn't fit. In fact, all of a sudden you can't translate what you dreamt about. Even though when you wake up, you could still interpret it, and even thought that "I need to write this one down before I lose it," by the time you get to writing it, it's all gone. Nothing left but a memory of dreaming about it.

Sometimes I've wondered about the idea of yesterday—including the whole past as I know it right now—if I truly experienced it or if it's a hard drive of some sort that I woke up with installed in my head this morning. So if it is a hard drive that gets installed daily, it will be difficult to separate the dream from real life. Who's to say, while I'm busy writing this, someone else is dreaming it in another realm? I've recently had a dream where I had been fighting with some script in my head, and I finally got it. When I woke up, I wanted to write it out and see what it looks like. When I was getting ready to write it, I realized that I didn't understand the language. I was only seeing it as a written document in a language I couldn't understand or translate.

You've had moments where you feel like you are dreaming if something spectacular happened in your life. Or hope you are dreaming if something terrible happened in your life. And you determine if it's a dream or not a dream by the fact that it continues to play out even after asking yourself that question (is this a dream or not a dream?). If it stops right there, then it was a dream. But if it continues to play out, then it's reality.

Can you make it all stop and make it all nothing but a dream? As if you are dreaming now?

But if you do stop it, what's on the other side of that? If all of this is a dream, then waking up from this—to what reality are we waking up to?

You know those terrible things that you might be secretly glad happened to you, because you know that they created leverage with God? That even when you are called to answer for your sins, and he'll be reading to you those gruesome sins you have committed over your lifetime, and you'd be just waiting for him to finish. Just before he hands down the judgment to send you down to the other guy that lives in an oven, you stop him and say "not so fast," "you remember that day when…"

A Lived Reality

A memory. I like how this is often paired with bad times, and almost like we are fighting to keep those memories alive in our minds, even in the present moment. Even with good things too. I mean, we are still celebrating the holidays that happened since the beginning of time. But also, we suffer the consequences of the actions that we never took, but we wake up every day with a feeling of being trapped in the past we never lived, and call it "lived reality."

True, we inherit some of the conditions based on what our ancestors were and did. Another truth: they suffered and also had a good time.

Another truth: staying too much in the past is not good for you. In fact, they have a term for this. It's called "depression."

How about the unlived reality?

This sounds better—dreamy, scary, and also full of potential. But this also carries anxiety.

How about present reality?

What is present?

We generally look at the present moment in terms of the days. I mean, even in language, which is one of the basic aspects of our behaviors. There is past tense, present, and future tense. But generally the present will be today, and we have that clear division between night and the day, and therefore tomorrow and today. But if we are looking at it through the "lived reality" lens, the present is a fleeting moment. You have one present reality one second and a second present reality a second later.

Then, what reality should we live in?

What is reality?

Is it the same thing as what we know versus what we don't know?

I have also wondered if it's all happening at the same time. The past, the present, and the future—all happening at once. Like all the BC times, Christ, Shaka Zulu, Cyril Ramaphosa, Elon Musk, whatever the next guy's name is. All happening at once, just in separate rooms.

Looking at our present moment, would you say that we are happy or suffering?

German Shepherd's Circle

I've recently had a silent interaction with dogs. What pissed me off was that this was not happening for the first time. Last time it happened, I told myself that I didn't know, but I made a promise to never walk this way. But it's a nice walk, with beautiful trees, shade, and the sound of birds chirping—a sense of peace and tranquillity. In the midst of all that, there are two huge dogs (German Shepherds) that look like hungry lions that have just escaped the cage and are in a hunting spree of killing and eating something fresh. They want to first instill that fear in your eyes so that your heart can beat up faster and pump so much blood, and you become juicy and delicious. Think of a ripe peach or juicy rump steak—the juicier, the better.

You have seen in the vampire movies and TV series how the vampires would act like they are letting the human go and let them run. When they think they're just getting away and in disbelief, Niklaus snaps their neck and drinks their blood like a stream of water pumping up from a fountain.

The two tricks that I've heard about when dealing with dogs. Well, the first one is not quite a trick because it made things worse, and tricks are supposed to make things easier. This one says that a dog can sense fear from you, and they only bite you if they sense fear from you. This is just not helping, because the moment I realize that there is a giant dog that's appeared out of nowhere and you can see it thinking about what to do with you.

Fortunately for me, I was given another pass. Because we will have these passes. It's just that we don't know when we won't be given a pass—if our last pass was our last pass. And the moment will come when we will have to fight tooth and nail to survive.

Dog Fight

After the dogs situation, I started thinking about the whole thing. It was very sudden. The moment you are in a situation like this, there is no other body part that can help you more than your feet. It's a quick connect: Eyes light up the danger, the brain interprets the danger, and ultimately the energy goes to your feet. You can feel them getting lighter. This is what I call thinking on your feet. I can tell you now, the last time your mind stops working is when you see one dog's feet going up towards your direction.

You literally get a quarter of a second to analyse what the danger is about and to make a decision right there and then. One of my favourite lines: "even not making a decision is making a decision in and of itself." You are making a decision to not make a decision. You are outsourcing your power to make a decision to someone else or something else.

Have you ever walked with a runner? The runners are the most careless people ever. You can't execute a successful mission with a runner. I used to be that person when I was a kid—a runner—until I got put in positions where I was the only one and I couldn't run, where I had no choice but to stop and fight back. To my defence though, I was not a very good runner. By not very good, I mean even kids younger than me would pass me when I was running. So I would give myself about a clear 5 strides before I tell you we are running. And what would make it worse would be that I would be laughing while I'm running, and it's very difficult to run when you are laughing. But damn! It was so good.

So if you are with a runner, you'd spot the danger. "There's a lion that looks kind of chilled. It has just eaten somebody before you appeared, so you are negotiating, asking for a way through." And in many cases, you do get it. Even in real life, metaphorically speaking. The problem is when you are with a runner. The moment you tell them, "Look, don't panic. There's a lion behind me. It's okay, I've already negotiated a way through for us." Before you even finished your statement, they're flying out of there. They only heard you saying "lion." Maybe they didn't even get to that "lion" part. They only heard "don't panic."

Now they've put the lion in an awkward position. It has to eat you both.

Imagine in the two dogs situation above, you are a man with your woman, or you are a mother with your child, or anybody with someone that they are responsible to protect and they are scared of dogs, so they might be runners when you encounter this situation. Let's go with a man for now. You see these two humongous German Shepherds. In this quarter of a second, you have seen that these dogs haven't eaten for at least two weeks. You've realized that this is a very old house, so there is an old person living in this house, and they have passed on. You can see one dog licking its nose, so you know that it was just eating its owner's last piece and it was not enough. It hated every piece of it, but it had to survive. The person that was responsible for its food is gone, and unfortunately he has become food.

I personally don't like Weetbix and oats. It's just that I find them very close to the taste of cardboard (please check my spelling here; I mean these cardboard boxes that you use to cover new furniture or anything that's new). But if you put me in a situation where I have to starve for two whole weeks to a point where I have no choice but to eat the actual cardboard boxes, you might be surprised how quickly you might overcome the fact that it's a cardboard box and look at its source, which is a tree, which is nature. Imagine you are in a camp where you even have to work to earn these cardboard boxes. If you did good for that day, you order yourself a pine tree double-deck cardboard box. In the midst of all of this, there is an airplane flying above our camp, and it drops bags of Weetbix—no water, no milk. Imana! I would be chewing through those dry brown blocks of Weetbix like cheesecake.

The first dog you make eye contact with is looking at you with those wolf eyes—dark black but that gold iris you can't miss. It's got flies eating its tears after the pain of having to eat its owner because of the lack of food. You are already plump. You are in love. You already know that your woman behind you—she's looking extra plump. You've been showering her with affection. And within this quarter of a second, you have to make a decision. What do you do?

I know what decision I would make, but the problem is I don't know what decision she would make. So our fate might be eternally up to her. And then after making her decision, I would have to wait for each dog's decision as well, because it's also not enough to get one dog's decision. If the other dog is in disagreement, the mission fails, because one thing for sure: the moment the dog in disagreement's feet are jumping towards your direction, the other dog that was in agreement is put in an awkward position now. It's going to have to come and eat you now as well.

Why Our Heroes Die

In this particular case, I'm not referring to our prominent heroes like Shaka Zulu or Nelson Mandela, but I'm talking about the guy you vouch for to live in a movie, book, or in life. There is a movie on Netflix that's based on a true story, where a Uruguayan flight that was carrying rugby players crashed in the heart of the Andes mountains in 1972. What happened there, with everything that has happened with flights disappearing in the past—hearing about places like the Bermuda Triangle—makes you wonder what this life really is. We have sinkholes and crazy things that can't be explained. Anyway, this plane full of people—rugby players and some with their families—basically just missed a mark and landed on another planet. That's the best way to explain it. But it's kind of similar to our hiking story when we missed a mark and we ended up somewhere I thought was a different planet, where I felt we were doomed for a very long time. But these guys were really doomed. They were on a different planet.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I think we might have mini planets within planet Earth, but that's a story for another day.

So, back to the 1972 plane crash story. After the plane crashed, these guys were stuck in this icy mountainous "mini planet," freezing with no food but some snacks and cigarettes, waiting for help. Some of the passengers had died during the crash, and some were dying because they couldn't get any medical help. The survivors were faced with a difficult choice: to decay to death as they slowly died, or eat their friends that had passed on. I didn't want these guys to eat each other. I kept hoping that there was help around the corner. They just needed to hold on a little longer. And there was a guy named Numa, my hero. After his friends had given in to eating their friends, he was resisting. He was not eating his friends. But they were stuck there for about 2.5 months. Numa had to force himself to eat his friends now, but it was a little too late. He lost so much strength, and he died eventually. I was devastated by this. So he was supposed to eat his friends?

What does being a hero mean?

Does it mean that it doesn't always come with being good and upholding moral standards? Sometimes you have to eat a dead friend in order to survive? I mean this also in a metaphorical way.

What about loyalty?

Does loyalty always look noble? Or does survival sometimes require decisions we don’t want to make?

These are questions with no clear answers.

Sleep.
Death.
Reality.
Courage.
Morality.
Letting go.

Maybe life is less about finding answers — and more about learning to live honestly with the questions.

The movie is called Society of the Snow