Midnight Mind Activity
It is not unusual of me to seemingly have my best thoughts right before going to sleep. Sometimes, this coincides with midnight, so I'm not sure if it's the magic of that hour, in terms of max involution, or there's actually some underlying reason that I may not be aware of.
Borrowing some science from circadian rhythm research and neuroscience, it seems the brain's default mode network becomes more active as we drift toward sleep, creating a kind of cognitive twilight zone where connections form more freely and unburdened by the executive function that normally governs our waking thoughts.
I think the mind can observably have this pattern of breathing in and out within certain timeframes and situations.
There's no fixed way to explain this breath in and out thing other than a possible analogy with being active versus passive, in terms of thought activity.
The inhale is the analysing, our mind reaching outward to process, categorize, solve. And exhale comes as releasing or the mind settling inward to integrate, synthesize, discover.
It's common for people to say take a deep breath when we get tensed, and being tensed is usually a by product of a lot of thought activity.
By the way, we let out a sigh as a way to reset one batch of thought activity and sometimes start another one.
Background Assembly
Somehow, the mind isn't silent even when it seems silent. There's always some activity happening back there in the background, and for me, it's usually around my time for sleep that some of these activities spill over into the foreground, so to speak.
The thoughts are qualitatively different also, and it looks like an aggregate of all of the information that I've consumed in the short to mid term, most of which I've forgotten or lost context of where they fit.
A comment from last week suddenly adjacent to a pattern I noticed months ago, both now illuminated by some article I skimmed yesterday. The mind, it seems, has been working a jigsaw puzzle I didn't know I'd assigned it.
If I take the role of an observer and not follow them (thoughts) around, then it can be a fun passive experience, perhaps watching a thought movie of an alternative reality that's strikingly similar to my current reality.
The images drift by with their own logic and if I can also resist the urge to direct the film, I sometimes catch glimpses of truths that my waking mind was too busy to notice.
Saving The Fragments For Later
But alas, the observer isn't content with just observing. It needs to participate and take on the role of a creator who knows that whatever isn't captured will dissolve like a dream, and that's when I find myself getting out of that state to note down a nugget or two of wisdom only to then find that the act of recording has broken the spell entirely.
I'm left holding a fragment that seemed profound mere seconds ago but now reads mundane in the harsh light of my phone screen and ordinary mind.
Still, I save it anyway, because sometimes these fragments are seeds, and I won't know what they'll grow into until much later..
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