Sleep is in love with Death

Many moons ago, my friend and I were walking up a quaint mountain path near the base of the Alps. Dawn was slowly breaking and our faces were finally starting to get warmed up by the gentle rays of sunlight reflecting from beyond the mountain. The cold had been unbearable, almost. What a night it had been. We’d been awake for 27 hours and our journey was nowhere near completion.

“You know… sleep is… weird.” – I said.

My friend looked at me confused and kept on walking, almost oblivious to my sudden realization that something so common, something most animals do is, in fact, weird.

“We get pulled into this unconscious state for several hours at a time, separated from the real world by only our mind descending into a state of complete ignorance towards every sensation coming from the outside. A while after we fall asleep our body locks up so we can’t move while we’re dreaming, basically leaving us paralyzed. It’s almost like… like death. But temporary.” – I continued, trembling from the glacial wind.

“Like death.” – my friend muttered. She turned towards me and smiled, almost as if to say “I understand.”

I was more or less thinking out loud at that point, trying to distract myself from the piercing chills of the ice and snow, surrounding us on all sides, like a casket of frost. The pressure was crushing, and it’d only get worse from there. The mountain stood before us like Goliath in the face of David – it was unconquerable. The sigh of the wind felt as though it was reminiscing of past events, way before our tiny lives as creatures of this planet – of this existence – were possible.

“They do say” – she murmured – “that Sleep is in love with Death. A forbidden love lasting from the very beginning of life until the moment when the Universe will collapse back on herself. You know… when you’re dreaming and suddenly you’re falling off of an impossibly high place, and right as you’re about to hit ground,” – she stopped for a moment – “right as you’re about to embrace the cold hug of Death, you wake up with drops of sweat on your forehead and your heart pounding at ten thousand beats per minute?“

“Yeah?” I said.

“How come you don’t die in the dream? Or rather, how come you can’t die in the dream?” – she asked.

“I-“

“Is it even possible to do so? I’d argue… it’s not. Sleep is too shy to even look Death in the eyes, let alone indulge in her cold embrace” – my friend said.

“That’s-“

“More so, Sleep is so obsessed with Death, it tries to mimic her all the time. It is but a way for us to taste death before it happens. It’s a free trial. Much like how every day of our lives has a dusk – a time that marks the end of the day, followed by an interlapse of sleep – there is a dusk coming for each one of us, approaching slowly in the distance, and it brings with itself an endless void, called Death. And yet” – she said – “we still live our life as though that dusk will never arrive. Not now, not tomorrow, not in 100 years. Not for us.“

We walked in silence for some minutes. The mountain peak now had a golden aura around it, glistening with rays of sunlight. Breathing was uncomfortable no more, rather, it felt refreshing. Our sleep deprivation was confusing no more, rather, it gave us an eerie sense of clarity. The mountain suddenly seemed no more daunting than a small hill. The cold suddenly felt no harsher than a gentle summer breeze.

We’d been through a lot, hadn’t we… but we could only go forward from there. Each step brought us that much closer to our destination as it did to our demise. We knew – however – that the dusk is coming our way regardless; might as well race it to the finish line.