The In Between, a forbidden version of the human mind.
Lately, I have spent some time thinking about the boundary that separates sleep from “real life”, the space that allows for phenomena like sleep walking to happen. A moment in time when you are not completely awake nor fully asleep. In this dimension basic body functions can still be performed intentionally, while the unconscious mind grapples with my will — who wants to take over. Sometimes I wish I could dwell permanently in that trance, in the zone straddling the two realms, dreams and material life. During these uncanny moments I feel weirdly out of place, I can’t talk, I am uncomfortable, and I try to escape as fast as I possibly can. Paradoxically, what terrifies me is what makes me yearn for it, I dread it and only when it is over I cherish its power.
My shallow analysis of human behaviour — that means of the few people I happen to know — suggests no one wants to spend much time in there, in The In Between. I have called it the In Between because it resembles a crossroads, a place where one can either take the path of wokeness or linger there a little longer, day dreaming, eyes fixed in a still position, having weird ideas and letting the mind do the talking. I have come to realise that it is in The In Between where some of my sharpest thoughts emerge, my brain is untethered, off the limits of reasoning and logic and unrestrained it runs hectically. My imagination is finally allowed to take over, but this just lasts for a few minutes. At times, I have managed to prolong the extent of that opening and what I have experienced then is what I can only describe as pure creative freedom.
The problematic of this conundrum resides in the fact that, once those moments are gone, they elapse into oblivion. It is very difficult for me to remember what I think while I am traversing The In Between. That is why I am writing this down, to remember, to leave a physical trace of what occurs while I am there. In this stratum of human imagination the superposition of dreams and material experience occurs, and humans are capable of feeling something akin to what dreams feel like but with a corporeal translation and a certain sense of awareness. I have noticed we tend to reject this, the culture of sleepiness is not something that exists, at least, in my most immediate surroundings. Since I was a kid I have been indoctrinated in reality; being a somnolent person is something bad.
Humans need sleep but the ambiguity places like The In Between provide we cannot tolerate, this is so deeply embedded within our culture that, every morning, millions resort to drinks like coffee to avoid the stupor that so characteristically illustrates this phase of human experience. We are not allowed to enjoy The In Between, much less spend some meaningful time in it, thus we walk past it. The contemporary ethos shaping modern culture crowns production queen of reality, and we have resorted to drugs — that is what caffeinated beverages foster — to complete a frantic and brief stroll through The In Between. In the modern world daydreaming is intolerable.
But, would it be possible that what I have interpreted as rejection could, in fact, be fear? the fear of losing control? That is exactly what this dimension of the human brain is offering us. During the time The In Between lasts, the subject can perform basic motor responses but the body feels numb. A certain listlessness is necessary to prevent attention from deviating towards the bodily manifestations of the waking body. This clash between the conscious and the unconscious reveals a pure version of the mind’s mechanisms and now, untamed, the thoughts run. Like Dalí or Edison, who took creative naps, not for the sleep but for the potent aftermath, I could write four hours — in fact this was produced after a long winter nap — only if I managed to explore The In Between. In that region of the brain rife with ideas and strange concoctions, automatic writing develops organically. But it just eludes me. Why?
Western societies have historically disavowed trances like this one — the battle between productivity and more hedonic outlooks on life bears historic roots, and has begotten conflicts like the Opium Wars, been the reason why laws like prohibition were enacted, and explains why a “ war on drugs” was waged in the U.S.— and in so doing, the possibilities for self-knowledge that such states offer have been shut down. In the contemporary renaissance of meditation and the careful consumption of substances like psychedelic drugs or cannabis, I perceive a switch in the common imagination and the dawn of a counterrevolution of ideas propelled by a longing for introspection and self-exploration. It can also mean the beginning of the slow defeat of the capitalistic forces that render humans mere cogs of a productive superstructure.
The In Between is intellectual freedom, but it is also another representation of the many forces that try to rebel against cultural trends and economic obligations. Perhaps, what makes it so unbearable and difficult to prolong is the deluge of thoughts that overwhelm the system during the process. My time in The In Between is feeble, only analogous to the long walks I take for meditation — this is learned from Nietzsche, who thought that great ideas are born walking — when the unconscious joins and, sometimes, takes over. The In Between is a distillation of pure, wondrous thinking. A version of my mind unknown to me, but undoubtedly mine, so pure that it only manifests in private. This space is also, in a way, the most revealing version of one’s psyche, when logic is not present and trying to wrestle control back to its hands.
All the data the physiological transmitters and glands in our bodies emit become an interference, a nuisance, because despite its physical manifestations The In Between is fundamentally an intellectual experience. In The In Between we manage to grasp slivers of who we are, it is a daily revelation of the many layers that compose the human mind, and of the deeper levels escaping our attention. It is in these moments when we are allowed to peek into the magnificence of the human psyche’s potential and those lucky souls who observe it, spend the rest of their lives chasing the hypnotising flashes of unalloyed humanity that are displayed there.
The In Between is a path we walk through every time we wake up, but we do it without paying much attention to it and that, we should revise. Our relationship with that personal dimension is fraught, especially in industrialised countries, because it opens a portal connecting two worlds; one full of potential and forgotten, the other performative and alienating. Don’t ignore it.
