4 May

Every night we all ‘rest’, after our days, as we sleep. The traditional Rest In Peace has usually meant our souls and/or bodies resting in peace, for eternity, with Christ or God. But what if there’s a much more literal way to understand this? A way that might unite the ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’? Why do we sleep? Sleep has been medicalised in our time, and I think that’s sent us backwards in understanding it. I think we sleep because sleep is where we return each night to the vast ocean of possibility out of which we came. Time is literally suspended, we re-enter the eternity of all times, our past never leaves us, we can relive it at any time, for example in our dreams as we sleep. We don’t understand time, it doesn’t flow like a river, when we sleep we experience eternity, literally and directly. Dreams are not movies in our heads. Whereas our days are narrow, focused activities, just one thing out of the millions of possible things we could do. That narrowing exhausts us, it’s hard work, and so every night we return to the eternal, to recharge. Death is just the next step along, a permanent return to the eternal, with no more of that daily narrowing. We already ‘die’ every day, when we sleep, death and life are not separate. We Rest In Peace every single day of our lives, the eternal is right there with us in every moment, even a daydream takes you back into it.