Who Are You When You Wake Up in the Middle of the Night?

You wake up in the middle of the night, scraps of dreams still swirling in your mind.  

You grasp at them, hoping to hold on and decipher them. But they evaporate. 

There is a moment when you do not know who you are, where you are, or what you are. 

A moment of no-mind. You are a body in a bed.  It is dark. There is nothing else. 

It lasts less than a nanosecond. 

Then the mind starts reconstructing itself.

Your identity pops into being. 

Oh, yes this is my bed, this is my bedroom. This is my life. The mind starts to recreate the events of the day before, ready to pick up the pieces of where it left off in its busy preoccupations. 

It starts to reconstruct itself. Whatever was roaming around in the mind comes back into focus. 

Especially what was bothersome. 

In the middle of the night, the mind goes on patrol, like a guard starting its night shift. It looks at the shadows looming in the dark and brings out its sword to slash them down. 

Maybe there is a little preoccupation from the day before. Or maybe a bigger worry. The mind starts to tussle with these shadowy threats, certain it can wrestle them to the ground. 

The more it wrestles, the worse it gets.

The mind creates a maelstrom of its own making. It is thinking about preoccupations. The more it thinks, the greater the worry. It is caught in its own trap.

The key is for the mind to direct itself out of its mental loop and to focus on other things. 

Go back to being a body in a bed. Be the body. Be the breath.

Also Read: Would You Make This Change to Your Sleep if Your Life Depended On It?