the oldest dream

before we could think, we slept. before we could name anything, we closed our eyes and entered a field where time folded and memory built itself in silence. every mammal curls into that field. every baby drifts toward it as if called back to a place it already belongs to. even reptiles, older than milk and language, fall into their own version of it. sleep’s the first language life ever spoke.

what fascinates me is how sleep remembers what we try to forget. it carries pieces of ourselves that were buried under years of doing, surviving, performing. sometimes it hands them back in dreams, other times in the stillness that comes just before waking. that quiet’s an archive. and when we enter it, it starts revealing the parts of us we thought were gone.

in mammals, sleep moves like a tide. rem and non-rem rise and fall, breath slows, memories turn into structure. babies spend most of their first months there. their twitching limbs, their moving eyes are premeditations for a life not yet lived. reptiles do it differently. their sleep’s simpler, but the current beneath it is the same. the body knows how to dissolve.

there was a time in my early thirties when music stopped making sense to me. i wasn’t planning to take my life, but i was deeply questioning why i was here. i searched for meaning and found none. my mind began inventing exits. what i didn’t see then was that this collapse was a doorway. the search itself was part of a larger intelligence trying to pull me closer to myself. i now see that music has its own kind of meaning. that moment of despair widened my curiosity and changed the direction of my work.

this is the terrain of the subconscious. it builds the world we walk through, draws the patterns that guide our choices, holds the instincts that know long before we think. it’s a mirror under language, an ancient animal inside our chest, a conductor of currents we mistake for chance, and a second planet with weather of its own. it devours itself and still remains. a head eating its own body and still present after the head’s gone.

sleep opens the gate to this field. as we drift, the layers between thought and instinct thin. this is where affirmations take root. words spoken here don’t stay on the surface. they sink into the deep soil where beliefs grow. meditation can bring us close to this state even while awake. as breath slows and attention gathers inward, the rhythms of sleep rise in the waking mind. here, sentences become seeds. visions become instructions.

to reach this field, treat the moments before sleep as deliberate. lower the light. slow your breathing. speak words that carry the shape of the life you want. repeat them as if you’re speaking to something ancient inside you. let them drift into the dark.

every night we join a lineage older than mammals and reptiles. older than the first beating heart. in that timeless field, the subconscious listens. it weaves, builds, reshapes. and in the morning, we rise carrying traces of that other planet inside us.