SLEEPER, AWAKEN!
“…A person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside, allowing him to grow. Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”
— Duke Leto Atreides, David Lynch’s Dune (1984)
Can someone truly start their life over and live a different lifestyle after age forty?
I write these words hoping to find an answer that question. Twenty-seven years ago, I began sliding into a deep depressive period, one I am still working to climb out of. I will discuss this depression more in a future journal entry. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was fleeing from my problems — and from the much larger issues in the world around me, crises that I had no control over and no understanding of how to cope with them — by retreating further and further into myself, a process that felt very much like falling into an incredibly deep sleep. Though this depression began for me at age sixteen, I didn’t fully drown in this inner darkness until after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001.
I didn’t wake up until a few months after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even that was merely a brief stirring from slumber; I fell back into sleep the moment my personal struggles grew too cumbersome to deal with mentally. I simply put my brain on autopilot and allowed myself to coast through the next six years as I stumbled about through the world trying to scratch out a place in it without truly understanding it.
I’m sick to death of sleeping. It’s time to wake up.
Over the past thirty years, I have lived a lazy, haphazard, unfocused, self-centered, barely-sustainable existence. While I have achieved a few meager accomplishments of note, I performed these feats while I was practically sleepwalking through life. What could I have accomplished if I’d have actually put some actual effort and focus into my projects?
I don’t want to be this person or to live his lifestyle anymore.
With each passing day, I grow increasingly frustrated and weary of the way I inadvertently mismanage my daily affairs, from the projects I fail to work on and the minor mistakes I make daily to the people I flake off on or fail to help when they need me. I find myself more and more aggravated with every aspect of my existence, from my terrible, half-hearted research I employ to my screwed-up financial planning. I do not want the few remaining decades of my life to be dominated by the problems I face today, whether the problems were caused by circumstance, by others, or by myself. The depressive sleep I fell into long ago has become a somnambulant nightmare, and I’m long past done with fighting my nocturnal demons.
I want to live a more joyful and sustainable lifestyle devoted to spreading the Gospel of the Messiah Yeshua and attaining the goals I feel drawn toward achieving instead of maintaining the dreary, isolated, damned “wage slave” humdrum, stumbling and shambling through an existence of silent desperation. I want to reconnect with the creativity within me, with Creation outside me, and with the Creator beyond all.
As director David Lynch said in the 1984 version of Dune, “The sleeper must awaken.”
Indeed, I will do much more than merely awaken from slumber. I will rise, dress in my armor, arm myself, and march forward into battle with the forces of darkness in my personal life and beyond. I will suit myself up with faith, determination, and perseverance, I will arm myself with information, meditation, and the tools I need to use my talents effectively, and I will march forward from the darkness of depression into greater glories than I have ever known before… and I will begin this personal campaign for positive growth and change — which I call “March Forward” — today, on the First Day of March 2025. I will post more details as they become available.
The sleeper is now awake… and may God help whoever gets in my way.
SOUNDTRACK:
“Lullaby” by Scaterd Few
