Insomnia

For The past 2-3 years I have been problem sleeping. I spend a lot of time trying to fall sleep…looking at the clock and getting up to read, e-mail, run,work...just to get myself tired enough to sleep...getting tortured by the time passing by, knowing that soon it will be time to get up  again to go to work while I cannot close my eyes and make my mind stop.

Few nights ago, the same thing happened, I was just fighting myself , rolling on my bed, thinking of all the things I had to do, of the people I have to talk to, the things they said during the day,looking at the room ceiling,and then...I woke up!

I woke up abruptly and disoriented.  It took me a minute to realize I was dreaming that I could not sleep, that it was a nightmare and that I was actually in my room, for real.

I wondered of course what was real but that is what I have been trying to find for a long time. Not the material real, the tangible, but that intangible quality that can make a person ‘be’  he or herself without apologies regardless of who is looking or asking any question.

The same quality that can make a space have meaning 

About ten years ago I had a similar experience. It was my first week in Canada, I woke up not knowing where I was. It was scary.

That feeling has not  left me. I have put it aside, but its a shadow I have learned to live with.I have managed to come to a relative balance where I don't conflict as much with my surroundings anymore but for that I need to keep my distance.

Architecture has been the same, I stopped getting upset when a mere piece of construction devoid of concept, poetry or meaning was mistakenly called architecture. I still see it, and fight against it, but in a different way. 

I can work and not feel completely disgusted with the result, but can tell that is not what I believe in or what I am looking for.  I have divided my time between dream and reality and I hope they are getting closer, because what people call 'real' is just a shell for me, a means to an end, to the dream, my real.

At the end the concepts refer to ourselves, 'the real' are not the facts but our perception of the facts, and what we make of them. As Italo Calvino puts it:

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space." 

I pick the second.