The Dreamer's Paradox

The Hypnic Jerk

The average person spends 22 years of their life asleep. One third of your life will be wasted. You’ll lie in an unconscious, catatonic state and sleep your life away. What if you could take those years back?

The desire to dream is primordial. Some evolutionary process has instilled life on this planet with the ability to dream. It is essential to survival. Even dogs dream. The exploration of dreams in search of answers we cannot otherwise obtain is a tempting solution to things we’d rather not deal with.

Sometimes, this desire transforms dreaming into a vehicle that attempts to displace the mediocre existence of our ordinary world. At first, it is a plunge into hyperreality - a world more real than the real itself. One so entrancing it can become an addiction with confusing side effects, such as finding evidence of things you don’t remember doing, looking at the world through a fog, or experiencing false awakenings - dreams that are so real it seems as if you have already woken up.

Yet as you sit on the verge of the illusory twilight, the view is so alluring you can’t help but fall into its grasp and be swept away into the dream world.

By now, the dream state has become your primary mode of existence and the reality you left behind is only a hazy memory. You have escaped, you have salvaged the time you’d otherwise have lost in sleep, you are leading a life by proxy.

Just as this form of escapism appears to be working, your sleep patterns collapse and parasomnia invades your life - you cannot sleep, you’re kept awake at night by unseen forces and the addiction to dream sinks its teeth into your mind, the mind split asunder by insomnia and insanity. I’ll tell you what dying is. Dying is what happens when you can no longer dream.

As you lie awake and alone with the sheets stuck to the cold sweat dripping from your body, you can’t help but form a skeptic’s hypothesis - it becomes impossible to tell when you are dreaming and when you are awake. Why even try to differentiate?

Suddenly, there is a great elucidation and the answer becomes clear. An equilibrium must be reached and balance much be brought to these two worlds. Only in moderation will sanity be achieved - overly embracing mundane reality and extreme escapism with both lead to ruin.

And as you once again drift peacefully to sleep, free of your former dissociation and confusion, you are reminded of the bizarre world that stretches away from your consciousness with one last hypnic jerk.

It is a dreamer’s paradox - by seeking escape, a surrogate world is created as a replacement. The lines between fantasy and reality are blurred, fact and fiction become identical. The dream is real, and reality is as meaningless as a passing dream.


~ Lyrics of the album by same name : JT Bruce

And if you didn't notice,there is a difference between the image here and the one above.


Clue: Diagonal symmetry ;)