The Disembodied Eye
A nice argument against vulgar realism, the incorrect notion that the world is simply given, could be something like the following: that even in a perfectly dark room, we must still close our eyes in order to get any rest, and even then, the objective reality of dreams never allows us to settle completely into total sleep. (We are like projective magic lanterns that never turn off—at night, we merely turn the shade to darken the room, but the lantern keeps shining.)
It is almost midnight, and to the north I can hear frantic drumming of some kind. The pitch of the snare is jarring, especially because it is so late, and I can imagine the kind of images these sounds must make on the already brackish surfaces of my elderly neighbors’ sleeping minds. But—distance softens everything, and yet, to me, now so awake, it sounds like war. Who is drumming? And there is laughter somewhere in the street between the drums and my head near the open window, which does not get rid of the image of war (the persisting laughter) but makes it much stranger. (Are wars always accompanied by such laughter?)
When I find that I cannot sleep, I imagine what might be going on outside in the dark where the world has become nothing but a collection of openings. I pick out fragments of street noise (but I am always surprised by how quiet the city can be), and sometimes, a hypnagogic image will begin to accompany the sound, which becomes the new matter for a dream, like a preface to the sleep that is to follow—but if not, then I am impossibly awake, and at such moments, staring at the ceiling, I will begin to have a hard time with my cardinal directions: north becomes east, south becomes north, and so on, until I might as well be dreaming—except I am irrevocably awake, as I said, and if I had any wisdom or good sense, I would get out of bed, get dressed and go outside for a walk, for in such a sleepless, misdirected state, the world appears as if freshly imagined, and we are able to move through it, uncommitted and open, like a disembodied eye in the lubricating solution of a nighttime territory that—always momentarily—resists accurate mapping.