The Dreamwalkers

Is it possible to PRETEND to be awake?

What comes to mind when you imagine pretending to be awake?

Perhaps it is the product of a sleepless night and an unwanted morning responsibility, coming together in a glazed charade of focus and alertness.

Or is it describing a performance designed to deceive the audience into believing the actor is in fact not daydreaming?

On the surface it feels like a weak lie, one that is easy to see through unless you are wearing a pair of glasses with wide open eyes printed on the front, allowing the bearer’s attention to drift and deceptively deviate from immediacy, so long as a safe distance is maintained. Alternatively, to pretend to be one thing is in fact to be another, in this case, asleep.

Is it even possible to falsify consciousness from within a dream?

Perhaps the closest experience to this seemingly impossible state is The Dreamwalker (not the lucid dreaming majickal mystic, this individual is definitely asleep). Your average dreamwalker is apparently aware of the present external stimuli and even seems capable of seeing and talking from within the dream, yet control is definitely lacking. To pretend to be in one state yet actually be within another requires conscious mastery of both domains. Pretending to be awake must therefore be more akin to placing oneself within a waking trance in which the mind can fully project a dream reality with full sensation, whilst simultaneously existing in the external present, as if the brain is partitioned in a duality of equal realism. I suggest that I am in fact describing a higher state of consciousness that can fully experience the dreamscape imagination with such control that it is achievable even from a non-meditative state of mind.

The humble swallow lives its entire life “on the wing”, never stopping flying when eating, mating, or sleeping. It must be extremely enlightened. I don’t think humans were designed to experience this ability and definitely lack the years of evolution to cope with it that I imagine the swallow has inherited, thus avoiding the psychic displacement and consequential damage it could potentially trigger.

I think I talked myself out of it.