Sunrise Over Evil

Free review - 802701 The real reason we sleep at night is to avoid the pummeling of the insidious and confusing thoughts and evil ideas and unanswered questions that linger in the dark, just waiting to pounce upon our conscious psyches in order to torment us to no end, devouring us with uncontrollable anxiety. These are devilish thoughts that usually live at night, unfettered by the heat of the sun and the tempering intellect of our waking spirits. These are not thoughts about doing bad things – Lord knows we have them at all hours of the day from time to time – these are thoughts that make macro-mountains out of micro-molehills; thoughts that blow everything out of proportion and force us to go crazy with anxiety and make our brains go gooey. Lying there in the dark, unable to sleep in the middle of the night, allowing the demons of the darkness to play billiards with our imaginings is about as terrifying as it gets; especially if you are a being who has tried to hide under the cloak of respectability, which is the personal guilt of the life of one who is a fraud. What’s worse for many, however, is that they feel no guilt, but should. For it is guilt that separates us from the barbarian. And the more we chew our imaginary, ever-burgeoning emotional and intellectual cud, the harder it is to fall asleep, making things even worse, making our anxiety even more hellish – all the while our eyeballs are gaining in density and gravity, making it even more difficult to nod off. These are the feelings of “The Twilight Zone”: the bad dreams we don’t mind having while we’re sleeping, because we know they are, indeed, just dreams. But having these weighty feelings and thoughts while we’re awake, while we’re trying desperately to fall asleep in the middle of the night – when we’re supposed to be nodding off, when we’re supposed to be replenishing ourselves for the next day’s experiential harvest – tends to shake and disintegrate the very foundations of the soulful moorings we expect to keep us connected to heaven and earth and humanity. These are the things of which soap operas are made, and they are the reason so many of us can identify with those stories of high drama and human absurdities. For it is the TV soaps that bring to life the worst of our fears that fester in our minds in the middle of the night and the wee small hours of the morning when sleep is out of reach, when we are vulnerable to the machinations of the devil, and when we are on the virtual brink of mindlessness. Sleep is the only escape from these demons, and the only temperance; and, when sleep doesn’t come, we flail helplessly and hopelessly and are easy prey to the dragons of the midnight murk in the canyons of our mind’s carnival, creating a nightmarish reality of our lonely and eternally solitary spirits. It is these dark demons that reveal to us the stark difference between the concepts of solitude and solitary, the difference between being alone and aloneness. For, when those forked-tongued serpents attack, there is no cure, except for the sunrise and the quasi/pseudo-sanity it brings; that is, if you slept at all. And if you hadn’t, the wounds remain open, uncleansed by the disinfectant the gods of sleep usually bestow. However, sometimes when we are in the midst of an unwinnable war between our worse fears and our own basic evilness … well, something’s gotta give. Hopefully, it’s not our minds. But rarely – especially when we are emotionally the most vulnerable – our efforts to sleep and dream bridges the gap between sanity and insanity, and we awaken not knowing which is which. It is then that you ask yourself: “Is suicide the only way out?”