I recently found myself pondering the realm of sleep and recalled the words above from Nabokov. Life is made of a ceaseless cycle of waking and sleeping, and it can seem as though waking life is the only “real” thing, but is it truly any less real than the world of sleep and dream? And what of the realm before we are born and after we die, the eternity of darkness? Sitting here, rocking in the cradle above the abyss, I could feel fearful, but that is only via attachment to the crack of light. Light is not light without dark, and vice versa. I welcome the dark. A part of me hesitates to say that, but the deepest part of me knows that it is both light and dark. Tonight, I welcome the embrace of sleep as a vast mother of darkness, with nonexclusive acceptance, whatever She may bring.

I am light

and

I am dark.

I am only afraid

of the dark

if I am attached

to the light.

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