something i've wanted to say

 Pseudophyseter

All dreams...serve the purpose of prolonging sleep instead of waking up. The dream is the guardian of sleep and not its disturber...Thus the wish to sleep (which the conscious ego is concentrated upon...) must in every case be reckoned as one of the motives for the formation of dreams, and every successful dream is a fulfillment of that wish. 

--- Freud, from The Interpretation of Dreams, 4:233-34 as modified by Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience p.98

In Cathy Caruth's dissection of Freud's conclusions on sleep / dreams she necessarily deals with Jacques Lacan's response to this same originating psychoanalytic text; for Lacan speaks further of the human need for sleep and postures that it is not only, as Freud says, a continual wish for unconscious dreaming. For

(t)he question that arises, and which indeed all Freud's previous indications allow us here to reproduce, is -- What is it that wakes the sleeper? Is it not, in the dream, another reality? 

--- Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, again quoted by Caruth

Lacan diverts our course and instead leads us to ask not why one needs to sleep, nor even why we dream, but rather why must we ever awake? To think of this seriously means to begin to forget any barriers between conscious and unconscious thought. And what becomes of my ethical existence? Which reality more fully demands my allegiance? I might conclude that the body belongs in both hemispheres, that my feeling of my body as a sieve in dreams and as a skeleton in waking hours are both correct, that when I lose my "I" it makes sense that it would make sense to do so.

Is it that the wish for sleep fails if I survive my dreams? I have begun to feel that I might need to take responsibility for my dream-actions, especially if I am to believe that my "I" has a double-existence and that my eyes never really close, the shift of an eyelid giving way to an iris that contains the cosmos. And if I dream because of death, because my understanding of mortality founders in both realities (un-or-otherwise) and sets me to wishing to know utterly my own end and yours too, then I dream only of life - a sort of living death which gives all my existences purpose in the pursuit thereof.

Capreolus Polyceros

Hitler slept, too. He and Nietzsche dreamed and lived their deaths one thousand times over. In many ways I cry at the thought of Shakespeare in medias res, or of Benjamin's somnambulism which lead to his suicide (to lose in a game of one-upsmanship with the threat of premature physical death, when others want your life to stave off their own) or of Orwell (maybe he never slept), Plato's shadows, Galileo's galaxies (and not just the ones in his head).

Hitler slept, too...