What’s keeping us up at night? One of the largest longitudinal studies to date examined evening consumption of alcohol, caffeine and nicotine among an African-American cohort and objectively measured sleep outcomes in their natural environments instead of laboratory or observatory settings. The study involved 785 participants and totaled 5,164 days of concurrent actigraphy and daily sleep diaries that recorded how much alcohol, caffeine or nicotine they consumed within four hours of bedtime. Results may be good news for coffee lovers, bad news for smokers. (1)

What is keeping is us asleep should be the question. How can we close our eyes and sleep while a cosmos full of dangers, hate, death, misery, oppression? How can we sleep peacefully in a world full of evil? No matter how you look at the question – either metaphysically or literally – the only way to answer is by denying the question itself.

We do not go asleep! There are no dreams!

Unless you are ready to accept your everyday life could be a dream as well. You never close your eyes! It is actually only when you dream that you see the more vivid of visions!

Sleep. The moon is still shining.

Open your eyes. The universe is still watching.

There is no one asleep. No one is awake! Do you see? It is the world that is tired. It is the world that is afraid of us. A world that is constantly awake. Always there. Even when we don’t look. For he is afraid of what might happen when he stops looking.

Take a moment to realize the meaningless of your existence. And you will immediately find its meaning when the moon shines bright in the morning day. And right when the world is not watching, you will for the first time catch a glimpse of it…