sleep.

Reality. Learning. Memory.

Each morning, she would wake up with an understanding that today is another day. That there was yesterday, and there will be tomorrow. That today is a present sandwiched by the past and the future, and that today she will apply her knowledge of her world from yesterday to theoretically be able to face her world tomorrow.

Knowledge and understanding. Feelings. Hope. Faith.

Today, however, something seems quite different. She forgets. She tries to remember why she keeps forgetting. She realises that she has been losing sleep. She wonders why she would, each morning, wake up with an understanding that today is another day. She starts to think that the order of time – the rise and the set of the sun and the cycle of death and of birth – does not make sense.

Déjà  vu.

What makes today different than yesterday? What will make tomorrow?

She takes naps in between her long states of wistful consciousness. Her naps are a millisecond in length and everytime she wakes up from those little naps, she gasps and tries to remember.

Have I lived?

How long have I lived?

Did I exist before I started living?

What happened before then?

She asked no question about the future as the future, she thought, was nothing more than a result of the past. But then she thought that she might be wrong.

Déjà vu.

Sleep, she thought. I need sleep.

In order to forget and stop accumulating knowledge, one simply has to stop to sleep. No sleeping pills, no soap, just simply has to stop to sleep.

Somnolence.

If events that happen in reality got organised within the realm of our memory during sleep, are insomniacs doomed for stupidity? If we got rid of blinks between sights and if we got rid of sleep between wakefulness, would our minds still be capable of forming a coherency of reality? Is it possible to experience this world and gather knowledge from it without any break at all?

She tried to answer her questions but surprisingly found no ground to even start doing it. She got more anxious as she started to lose faith in reality. Anxiety, in turn, prevents her from sleeping.

What is dream after all? If it is simply the reverse of reality, how do we know which is which?

Déjà vu.

What are the rest of the world doing when I blink? There is a good reason that our earth is round: so that there are different timezones, and so people will never ever sleep together all at the same time. Along the twenty-four hours cycle of a day, at least one person will stay awake to watch it: keeping watch of reality, so it does not run away. What happens if the whole world would blink in sync? Would reality then fail to exist?

But has that ever happened?

In which side of reality?

Blink. Limbo. Blink.

Sleep, she thought. I need sleep.

Today, she turns thirty-six. All those years of doubting.