Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

[Flex Mentallo]

[Flex Mentallo]

[Flex Mentallo]

[Flex Mentallo]

[Flex Mentallo]

[Flex Mentallo]

[Flex Mentallo]

[Flex Mentallo]

[Flex Mentallo]

It was 5.00 am at Bubaneshwar Station. The three of us were rushing for a train. But as we passed into the station, I saw as if for the first time what I had seen so many times before. For as many people are dashing hither and yon, there are as many sleeping. It is this that became my focus...

[Flex Mentallo]

“People say, 'I'm going to sleep now,' as if it were nothing. But it's really a bizarre activity. 'For the next several hours, while the sun is gone, I'm going to become unconscious, temporarily losing command over everything I know and understand. When the sun returns, I will resume my life.'

If you didn't know what sleep was, and you had only seen it in a science fiction movie, you would think it was weird and tell all your friends about the movie you'd seen.

They had these people, you know? And they would walk around all day and be OK? And then, once a day, usually after dark, they would lie down on these special platforms and become unconscious. They would stop functioning almost completely, except deep in their minds they would have adventures and experiences that were completely impossible in real life. As they lay there, completely vulnerable to their enemies, their only movements were to occasionally shift from one position to another; or, if one of the 'mind adventures' got too real, they would sit up and scream and be glad they weren't unconscious anymore. Then they would drink a lot of coffee.'

So, next time you see someone sleeping, make believe you're in a science fiction movie. And whisper, 'The creature is regenerating itself.”
― George Carlin

[comicjack]

I wish i could do some regenerating at this stage 

[comicjack]

14 hours ago, Flex Mentallo said:

Just like New York City 

[Flex Mentallo]

Mirror

“There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes, which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things about it, and enable it to ramble at its pleasure. So far as an overpowering heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter inability to control our thoughts or power of motion, can be called sleep, this is it; and yet we have a consciousness of all that is going on about us; and if we dream at such a time, words which are really spoken, or sounds which really exist at the moment, accommodate themselves with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost a matter of impossibility to separate the two. Nor is this, the most striking phenomenon, incidental to such a state. It is an undoubted fact, that although our senses of touch and sight be for the time dead, yet our sleeping thoughts, and the visionary scenes that pass before us, will be influenced, and materially influenced, by the mere silent presence of some external object: which may not have been near us when we closed our eyes: and of whose vicinity we have had no waking consciousness. ”
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

[Flex Mentallo]

What really struck me at Bubaneshwar station early that morning, stepping past all those still, sleeping forms was not the poverty of the sleepers but their sheer abandon.

[Flex Mentallo]

The wealth of sleep, the little death, hidden away for the most part in intimate spaces like a miser's hoard, not as here on public display.

[Flex Mentallo]

No signs said, 'Do not disturb', yet sleep continued en masse, unabated.

[Flex Mentallo]

Free.

[Flex Mentallo]

So the purpose of this station has become for sleepers to dream.

[Flex Mentallo]

The vast expanse of concrete on which they lay (and with the minimum of bedding), seemed rather to me to be a mirror of heaven, reminding me of Tintoretto, Titian, and Tiepolo.

[Flex Mentallo]

So in sleep they seem like figures out of myth, but instead of flying across a heavenly sky, these sleeping bodies swooped across the ground, the locomotives of their sleeping minds invisible.