Deep Sleep and Precursors to Meditation

The last two days have been very odd for me. My dreams have had a depth that is pretty rare and I haven't seen regularly in many years. And this morning when I woke up, I felt that my 'awareness' was 'still at depth'. I felt tranced but not in the normal dull-fuzzy way, rather just in the most-my-brain-is-deeper way. I was so intensely sleepy, the sort of feeling I used to get when my body/soul/whatever was insisting I sleep immediately to work something out, that a couple hours after I woke up this morning, I went back to sleep!

My kid woke me up later, astounded I was sleeping so late. (That's really something, coming from her, haha.) So I got up and made her food and did a few things online and then knew that I had to go back to sleep yet again. No matter how illogical it seemed, my body was insisting. So I went back to sleep for several hours.

I dreamed so deeply. What seemed like hundreds of dreams. Some were surface dreams but they involved events and people that haven't been in my life in 20-25 years. Most were deep dreams and one of the oddest factors was the awareness factor of a third element that was neither me nor dream. Dreams would be stopped at some point and someone would ask me, are you aware you're dreaming? or they would point out to me some element of the dream situation I was missing, or they would say, so what would be your decision in a situation like this? It was so odd, as it felt almost like a spiritual interview of some kind as well as education as part of it. Yet when I woke up, the whole content of the examples vanished from me and I 'understood' that was the way it had to be.

So I was up for a few hours mostly doing online stuff, when my internal-visuals started kicking up. What I mean by that is, I tend to daydream, even while in the process of thinking about something else, writing code for a website, typing email, whatever. The word 'daydream' is not accurate as that implies majority conscious control. It's more like I sometimes interfere a little in 'interest' but usually it's some other part of my mind doing whatever it does... I'm not consciously driving them. This is just a multi-track kind of thing, no big deal.

But suddenly whatever daydream the rest of me was having, the visuals and whole environmental awareness of it was getting so powerful that it started distracting me from what I was doing. When I turned my attention to it, it completely dropped in, like the sort of half-"Visions" I used to have a long time ago -- they are somewhere between a full vision and an archetype meditation. (Who knew there were so many 'degrees' of conscious involvement in one's own inner experience?)

I realized that my body and mind were basically saying, Hey! Pay attention! so I moved aside my laptop and turned off the light and closed my eyes and let myself be absorbed into the environment already fleshing out inside my head. And that's how the next stage of the archetype meditation began -- apparently it was my 'self' bringing it on, I realized, so I accepted that and moved into it.

PJ