They tell me I never sleep. They let it crawl out of their throats with a kind of uneasy honesty, layered with concern and curiosity but mostly with bewilderment. They say I must be burning myself out. They say a person cannot live on such strange hours without consequence. They say my nights must be heavy and my thoughts frantic. They assume I am wandering through darkness with an empty mind and a tired heart. They do not understand that I do not move through the night as someone avoiding rest. I move through it as someone already caught inside a dream that refuses to let me go.
It has always been this way. Since childhood I have lived with the sense that the outer world is only the flimsy surface of something deeper. While others sleep to reach that inner place I walk there as if I never left. The dream does not wait for my eyes to close. It rises without warning. Ideas stretch and collapse like weather I cannot control. A single thought becomes a room. A memory becomes a road. A feeling becomes an entire season. I do not sleep because I am already inside a story that continues whether I participate or not.
There is a strange alchemy in this. A kind of mercy. It is as if the world inside me knows I am too restless to give myself to stillness. It holds me in its own way. I dream in daylight where colours feel sharper and possibilities stay young. I dream again under the moon where everything grows solemn and sacred. The body will lie down when it must, but I rest on something older than flesh. I rest on the breath of what I create. I gather myself in the open terrain of my imagination, where nothing is judged and nothing is told to leave.
Some nights I feel a darkness grinding through my chest, a pull toward the depths of myself where longing walks barefoot across every memory I tried to bury. Unfinished stories press their weight against me. A distant idea cuts through the mist, vicious and unrelenting. It demands shape. It demands release. This force keeps me awake more faithfully than any alarm. It is not torment, though it carries the sting of pain. It is the pain of becoming. The pain of creation. The kind that refuses to let a soul sleep through its own evolution. The kind that gifts me dreams while others are sleepwalking through the day.
And in those moments I understand I do not avoid sleep. I simply inhabit another landscape. I do not sleep because I dream in the daytime and dream in the night-time. I do not need to close my eyes to rest the soul, only the body. And even when the body rests I remain awake inside the cosmic dream that is my life, shaping me as I shape it, lifting me towards a dawn only I can see.
Sometimes I wish I could sleep. Truly sleep. Fall into the nothiungness others describe so easily. There are nights when I watch the dark spread across the room and want to let everything dissolve, to let my mind loosen its grip and fall into silence. I imagine what it must be like for people who drift into rest without fighting themselves, whose thoughts do not flare up the moment the lights go out. I imagine what it must feel like to be held by stillness instead of chased by creation.
But the soul keeps calling. It calls in a tone I cannot ignore, a tone older than anything I know. It reaches for me with the certainty of something that remembers where I began. And when it calls I cannot dismiss it. I lift my head toward the sky as if the answer is somewhere in that dark blue expanse. I let the night move through me, and I keep dreaming because the dream refuses to die.
Honestly, there are moments when I believe one day I will be allowed to rest. One day the stories will stop clawing at me. One day, the ideas will settle. One day, the soul will release me long enough to let me sleep through a full night. But that day is not now. The world inside me has not finished its turning. The spark has not dimmed. The dream has not completed the work it began.
So for now, I remain awake. For now, I keep listening. For now, I stand beneath the open sky and let the dream move through me, knowing that rest will come only when the soul has spoken everything it needs to speak, and not a moment earlier.