LSD-1 Happily Awake

After a restful sleep, let’s all be…

Happily Awake!

by Ding Reyes

HO-HUMM! You yawn at that point of crossing over from being happily asleep to being happily awake. You do not yawn when you wake up; yawning wakes you up. It’s a lungs­ful of air rich in oxygen that keeps you alive as it also keeps fires burning. Good morning! In Tagalog, “Hoy Gising!!!” You stretch the way a cat does while yawning and waking up. You now have two options—rise and shine now, or rise and shine, uh, a little bit later. “Mag-‘iinin’ muna,” which some friends of mine have called “Tawad muna nang konte,” or “Magfa-five minutes muna” for about half an hour.

Anyway, it looks inevita­ble, you do have to get up. My brother-in-law, Rene, would laugh­­ingly greet me, “Rise and shine!” and add curtly with a poker face: “Well, if you real­ly can’t shine, at least have the decency to rise!”

How ready are you to rise? That depends on how happily rested you were in that sleep. If you had been well rested, you can want to go on sleep­ing, but you no longer need to.

You can exercise your free will about simply wanting to enjoy more of that sleep, but at the very least, be honest! At least to yourself!

After that yawn, however, unless your body still badly needs to fall back to sleep, it won’t fall back to that most enjoyable part of your sleep.

So, what the heck, let go and spring up to greet the new day with a bounce!!! It’s going to be a great day and it can only start for you when you wake up, when you really wake up.

Now, that sleepwalking trip to the bathroom is not yet re­ally waking up. But it may be a start, anyway, especially if nature calls urgently.

But nature calls urgently another way, a way to really wake up to a new and happy day.

You may start by moving from lying to an Indian-squat position and start moving your head to wake up those neck muscles. If you have stiff neck, you will have to check your pillow to see whether it’s too small or too big for your comfort. But you can do that later. Start with the twisting and swaying of the head. Slowly, and as far as you can go. One, two, three.

Then spread those wings that you call arms and start flying or swimming in place, before proceeding to waist twisting. One, two, and finally to a few cycles of really deep breathing.

Nature calls, not only to­wards the C.R. but to the great outdoors, or to whatever simi- lar to it is easy to reach. Look at a plant inside your room, or better yet look out the window and behold the scene, a visual delight--- trees, clouds, mount­ain­slopes and hillsides, shrubs and but­terflies, and flowers that grow everywhere. Smile at them, appreciating their be­auty in detail – dewdrops on leaves, rough textures on tree barks, new blades of grass peeking out of the ground, a bird here and there, a caterpil­lar inching its way, a spider­web’s exqui­site weave design.

Gently tickle the smallest baby leaf. Then another, then another. You can find one at the end of every living branch. By doing that, you are giv­ing them your energy. And they are giving you theirs with neither of you losing any because, as your energies meet, they synergize. In short, the en­ergies magnify. Your sib­lings in nature seem to smile back at you and you can feel strength welling up from with­in you.

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Sun greets us,

“Hello there!

Welcome Back!”

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Greet the Sun “Hello! Welcome back!” Actually it is the Sun who is telling us that, for it’s our part of the Earth that turns away every night from the Sun’s ev­er-shining smile.

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...And then, say “Good mor­n­ing!” to the world again. Now you can say that with much more feeling than when you tried it in your bedroom between all those oxygen-fil­ling yawns.

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...Many people sleepwalk to the bathroom upon “waking up.” Many others sleepwalk all over town – to work or school and back – the whole day ev­eryday, all their lives! That is not being happily awake. That’s not even being really awake!

Being really awake means you have all eight senses active and running all at the same time. These people are only “for­mally awake.” So, they sleepwalk all over the place, and sleepwalk all over their lives.

Were you awake enough just now, while reading this, to notice my use of the phrase, “eight senses” at the beginning of the previous paragraph? If you didn’t notice it at all, you are not really awake enough to be mentally alert.

But now that I called your attention to it, you might be curious about what eight senses I am talking about. That’s good news! The sleep­reading sleep­walker can never be curious, because curiosity is exclusive to the awake. Con­grats! You are awake!

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...(Now, if you get jolted by a realization that you’re not get­ting any sense of what I am saying in these few paragraphs’ train of thought. A fully-aw­ake speedreader can fall into short little naps without real­izing it. It’s all right. It hap­pens to everyone one time or another, especially if the read­ing material is not that stimu­lating. (What do you mean, ‘like this one’??)

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The eight senses are your sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste, plus the sixth sense, which is intuition, then com­mon sense and sense of hu­mor. Some pe­ople are able to wake up to varying minimal degrees on­ly their first five, namely the physicals.

Take sight, with or without extra lenses. When you are busy with a thought, or hur­rying with anxiety or trying to figure out a mental puzzle while walking, chances are you will not notice those beautiful flowers or the lush green sceneries, or the majes­tic cotton-like clouds that the eyes actually see, even if only peripherally.

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When you realize and yet you do not notice these things even when you are walking idly, there might be something deep within you that is asleep “all the time,” and you have been missing a lot on the pleasing and intriguing reality all around.

You might as well have been color-blind because colors would not have any practical use for you, anyway. Of course you wouldn’t want to be color-blind just because colors are not useful to your existence. If you appreciate colors at all, the first thing you have to do is notice them en­ough! The same with lights and shadows, you know, how bright, how dark, that sort of thing.

On and off, I have been pro­fessionally giving lessons in dev­eloping some illus­tration skills, which I consider an im­portant tool for visual artistry and expression. The first lesson always con­cen­trates on observ­ation.

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Here, color is not neces­sa­rily the first point, but the shapes of fi­gures or elements in a scene to copy on paper. This entails seeing combina­tions of the vari­ous specific shapes, sizes and proportions of the all-familiar basic shapes (rectangles, triangles and­ el­lipses). “Do you see that tree and its shadow forming a triangle right there?”

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If the person can see only the tree and the shadow separately, even if in detail, but cannot see even just the letter “L” they seem to form, if anyone is unable to see the rectangle in the side-view picture of the cow or the ellipse in a circular plate view­ed at an oblique angle, I’d say something is wrong with his eyes. Or he is asleep.

“If people can see only the tree

and its shadow, but cannot

see even just the letter ‘L’

theyform, something

may be wrong

with t h e i r e y e s!”

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The eyes, after all, are not just a pair of electronic came­ras sending impulses to a screen. The eyes of a fully awake human are connected not just to a screen but to a brain with capability for ima­gination, for virtual imaging and super-im­position on the basis of its past files.

A fully-awake human be­ing has a fully-awake eyes-brain team-up that can notice specific basic shapes, propor­ tions, and angles, and specific combinations of these. A fully-awake human not only has “an eye for detail,” but also an “eye for correlation.” If you can see only individual trees and not notice the forest that includes them, you may really be in need of some more sleep.

About ears. One cannot have “an ear for music” with­out being able to pick out, or at least notice, from a noisy caco­phony the various attributes of sound in each bit of music or noise -- volume, texture and pitch.

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In the noisy milieu that is the city, one can have good use for the capability to shut out all the noise all around, the way my best friend and I did while traveling in a jeep that was blaring out stereo-music, (by half-whispering a Carpen­ters song to­gether)

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But one also needs to be able to listen to, and hear clearly, the various sounds one wants for any purpose to listen to. As my poem on “irritated Soles And Souls” sings in its closing lines: “One need not be deaf, just strong, to go pla­cidly amid the noise and haste.”

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It’s actually a matter of ear focusing, of concentration of attention. It’s a matter of real­ly listening. Only fully-awake ear-brain team-ups can do that well. It’s not quite easy to keep on doing that well.

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Well, one gets to be slee­py, especially when the wind ins­tru­ments and string instru­ments start blending too well toge­ther and blending as well with the beginnings of a hea­venly dream. Ahhh!

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....Taste and smell often go together. When one is numb, so is the other. When the nose smells a deli­cious odor, the tongue begins to imagine tast­ing delicious food. When the nose smells something foul, the mouth seems to taste it, and this often triggers spitting. But sharp senses of taste and smell do not get dulled by sleep or sleepiness, but usually by certain illnesses affect­ing the secretion of mucous that covers the olfactory nerves in the nose. This mucous gets swallowed as post-nasal drip to also affect the mouth fluids and ultimately the taste buds. Cer­tain medicines used for cur­ing this malady cause drows­iness or sleepiness to set in, because the cure for this often needs for one to get en­ough restful sleep.

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…we may not have been fully awake most of our days…

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....Touch. This is actually a touchy subject matter, with spoken and mental debates ra­ging across the boundary bet­ween simple touches of fond­ness on the one hand, and ro­mantic or erotic touches on the other. How about both? Pro­longed touching often goes beyond perceiving into the realm of enjoyment or suffer­ance, as the case may be.

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...The skin and, secondarily, the muscles underneath serve as the organ for the sense of touch. This perceives the text­ure of the object being touched, its softness or hardness, even its temperature and, in some cases, its size and shape.

A fully-awake human is sensi­tive to touch – sensitive to the feeling of touching or of being touched. A person who is not fully awake would not notice immediately, for ins­tance, that his shoes are on fire, or that he has been cut by a very sharp blade. (He begins to “feel” the cut only after he sees all the blood!) When one touches something very hot and even his reflex nervous system fails to withdraw his hand or finger real fast to pre­vent higher degrees of being burned, that person is not fully awake.

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I have once described hug­ging as “maxi­mum touch.” Indeed this goes well beyond the level of sense-perception far into the realm of sensual, emotional and even spiritual joint enjoy­ment.

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About the other three sen­ses…

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The sixth sense is an ex­ception when it comes to being awake with the rest of the body. Intuition and other psy­chic and subconscious ca­pabilities are said to be sharp­est when the rational mode of the brain is asleep. They often clash right in your mind, and you sometimes get confused whether your hunch is a logic­al hypothesis, a real intuitive sens­ing or plain wishful thinking (or its opposite, worrying).

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The “sixth” sense embraces all sorts of senses outside “the physical five.” The organ for this is the electromagnetic en­er­gy body that is visible and “photograph-able” beyond the skin as the colorful aura, and is centered in the chakras, and in what traditional Chinese medi­cine has mapped as the energy-channel meridians and acu­puncture points.

Electromagnetic energy bo­dies are sensitive to radiated en­ergy patterns from “outside” and have innate, though large­ly undeveloped, capacities for intuition, mental telepathy, clairvoyance, psychometry, te­le­­kinesis, and many others.

Common sense is the func­tion of the fully-awake ratio­nal brain. Sleepy people, espe­cially those who have not had full restful and deep sleep for two or three straight nights, have many lapses in logic.

They often reason ridicu­lous­­ly, especially when they feel pressure to speak out. Think­ing aloud worsens the problem and persons talking with them have to have a lot of patience, determination and compass­ion, to get any sense from the gibberish of the sleeptalkers.

And sense of humor. Well, we know that persons who are not fully awake, especially if abruptly awakened after hav­ing had only “twenty winks,” are not exactly in their jolliest mood. To be frank about it, they (or we) are probably grou­chiest in such a condition.

People say that laughter is the best medicine. It really is an effect­ive cure for sleepy grouchi­ness. And a whole lot more.

This is not only because of the positive disposition it is giving. It also has something to do with the very act of laugh­ing which draws in a bigger than usual amount of oxygen into the lungs, and pumps a wellness-enhancing se­cretion into the bloodstream.

Laugh at a joke, but not at a joker. If the latter is a sensitive one and a boxer at that, he might just send you right back to sleep, with or without a mandatory eight count. Better yet, laugh at your own jokes, the funniest you can remember.

These are just some of the simple joys of being fully awake. We Filipinos have a broadcast-inspired slogan use­ful for this: “Hoy, Gising!”

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