Before I started today’s daily writing, I suddenly decided to try three minutes of mindful breathing first.
My thoughts still refused to stay obediently fixed on nothing but my breath, so in that sense it wasn’t pure success. And yet, when I opened my eyes, the world did look sharper, cleaner, almost newly washed. I wasn’t especially thrilled by that feeling of renewal, though, because I had already tested it thoroughly a long time ago, using the most childish version of a controlled experiment.
When I was little, during school eye exercises, I used to have a strange thought. We would keep our eyes closed for a while, following the routine, and when I finally opened them again, my eyes—after being shut so long—would be unusually sensitive to light. On sunny days especially, everything around me seemed more vivid, more saturated, as if the eye exercises themselves had brightened the world.
So I gave myself a hypothesis: after four counts of eight beats, plus the acupressure massage, eye exercises could produce a more brilliant kind of light.
At first I deliberately skipped a few beats with my eyes closed, then opened them and found that I still got that fresh, reborn brightness. So I started adjusting variables. I did one or two fewer movements. Same result. Then the experiment grew more "complex": during the second section, when I was supposed to massage one point, I switched and did the fourth section instead, scraping around the eye sockets at the temples. The conclusion still held.
The breakthrough came by accident. I wanted a quicker way to verify the result, so after only the first section I secretly opened my eyes. That should have ruined the experiment, but it revealed something else: if I kept my eyes closed for only one count of eight, that reborn feeling became much weaker. So I shifted the variable entirely to the duration of darkness. Under repeated warnings from the class monitor for not doing the exercise properly, I finally arrived at the real conclusion:
The eye exercises were never the reason the world suddenly looked brighter and richer. The essential cause was simply that I had kept my eyes closed through four counts of eight. After that stretch of darkness, opening them again produced the feeling of being returned to life.
Around the same period, I became aware of another question that seemed just as worth testing: some people are afraid of the dark, and some people are afraid of nightmares.
If closing your eyes means darkness, and falling asleep means you might enter a nightmare, then how do people avoid these two unavoidable bodily experiences? Would they choose never to sleep at all?
At the time, that conclusion felt sarcastic, almost absurd. But last year I ended up disproving myself.
My brain, because of illness, simply would not stop. I couldn’t enter sleep properly. Night after night, I stared blankly at the wall while my mind screened one strange, fantastical plot after another. Later, as my body’s condition worsened, I began manufacturing nightmare after nightmare for myself. I wanted to wake up, but all I could do was force myself through them, one after another, because each dream’s ending made me think I had finally awakened.
There is something oddly important in the order of all this.
Sleeping Beside Nightmares was not a title I came up with now. It had already existed, awkwardly, years earlier. In a novel I wrote in 2020, there was a nonfiction book that existed inside the fiction—a documentary-style work written by the female protagonist about the male protagonist, and about their son, both of whom could peek into other people’s lives through nightmares.
More specifically, the man in that story could witness everyone’s nightmares. They were hideous, nauseating, bizarre beyond explanation, and in the end they dragged him down into the abyss of other people’s dreams.
“These are all my nightmares—more than forty years of them—right outside the window... they’re here!”
As he spoke, the points of light approaching from the horizon beyond the glass finally revealed what they really were. There were grotesque creatures from the deep sea, releasing low roars that could only truly be felt in the darkness of the ocean floor. There were the painted totems once smeared across the bodies of people sacrificed to ancient gods; you could almost smell the damp heat and stench of red pigment mixed from cow’s blood. There were enormous planets crushing all available space, collapsing time itself, dragging people into their gravity until escape became impossible and their gaze could no longer be shaken. And there were symbols too obscure to explain—but one look at them was enough to know they had sealed your face beneath an invisible membrane that could neither be seen nor torn away...
In that novel, the male protagonist eventually reached a kind of reconciliation with himself. He became an illustrator of fairy-tale picture books, translating nightmares into something “healing.” His work became beloved as fairy tales for adults because it truly soothed their fear of ordinary life. No one knew that behind those paintings were the nightmares themselves, still raw and bloody.
I finished that fictional novel in 2020. In 2021, I went through a serious illness stitched together out of nightmares. That sequence still feels strange to me, as if some version of myself in a parallel world entered my subconscious early and turned a future prophecy into story first. But that is another matter.
People enjoy all kinds of irrational avoidance, but no one can truly reject sleep forever in order to defend themselves against darkness or nightmares. Violate the body’s basic order, and punishment follows. And when that happens, that is when real darkness and real nightmares begin.
That is why people become superstitious about procedures. They want to believe that if the school eye exercises are done properly—four counts of eight, exactly as required—they will gain that feeling of rebirth. But the truth is much simpler: close your eyes consciously for three minutes, and you can reach something very similar.
As a child, I didn’t really like going to bed on time, so my family suspected that maybe I was afraid of the dark and too embarrassed to admit it. They bought me a small night-light that plugged in by the bed.
I still remember it clearly. It was made of colored glass and shaped like a clock tower. When it glowed, it did not create any sense of safety.
I would stare at it in a daze and begin to see stories that were more terrifying because of the light: a woman hanging from the top of the clock tower; a man burned black at the center of the brightness; or a gate that opened only at midnight, releasing ghosts and monsters in a steady stream until they filled the whole room.
I stared at that lamp, hoping it would drive away the dark.
Instead, my pupils adapted to its glow. Then, when I looked back into the surrounding darkness, the darkness had become something heavier, harder to describe. A persistent afterimage and shadow would remain, impossible to erase.
That was when fear really began.