Would you like cream or sugar with your dialectic tension?

...which would infer coffee.

....which is a flacid but adequate segue to bring us to today's subject matter: the dialectic springboard that time and somnolence can offer me. Huge, actually. You see:

I understand the dialectic tension as a force that can refine. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. uh-huh. I have an idea or a proposition. I challenge it, let's say through dialogue, inner or outer, and if succesfull, like the oyster taking in an irritant and spitting out beauty, I come out with something new. Refined. I have moved forward.

The words, like many that present themselves to me, are tied to diaphanous images. I see an engine, a progressive machine that takes thoughts in, and through the tension of progress, produces something new but related at the other end.

Time and sleepiness both offer this for me, although right now their tension feels like it's just pushing my face up against a window; pressure steady, with no give yet. This would be the input of the dialectic engine.

I have seen into the kernel of time and sleepiness, but only in a limited fashion ~ usually the painful half of the whole. Which is ok, the pain is one of the drivers of dialectic tension. Time Shadechaser? How can Time be painful?

The clearest picture I have is of being on a ladder, painting. Summer job, look at my watch, 9:05 am. And the feeling associated with it is just...helpless, trapped, time. oh my god i don't like painting how long will this go on I've got to work for the whole day and oh FUCK it's only been 2 minutes how am I going to get through the next eight hours I'm bored what should I do...

And so on. Trapped in a miserable situation, not wanting to be there, wanting so much to be somewhere anywhere else but trapped TRAPPED as the clock marches interminably forward. Sleepiness hovers around - sometimes as a precursor to the trapped clock checking, sometimes as an escape route from the unpleasant feeling.

And of the two somnolence is, well, maybe not worse, but more dreadful. I contract, there is a heaviness around the eyes...I need escape...I need, I HAVE to have a nap.

Now I have progressed enough o'er the years to have a bit of insight and space around time and sleepiness, but my face is still up against the window. Maybe being rolled down a bit with non-dual inquiry with hsfh, but still a low dead pressure system hanging over my head.

When I am sleepy now, where does the Witness go? It is clearly there but clouded. But how can awareness be occluded?

When I am locked in and dreading time, I can have enough insight to step back as awareness and just watch the different sensations, but this process itself is timebound, and experience, and as such ultimately doomed to be sucked down into the Time hole itself.

So how do I deal with somnolenc-occluded awareness? And how do I remain aware outside of experience so that timelessness does not collapse into Time?