Asleep

Asleep

Sleepwalking, spiraling Earth
Awake in your world of dreams
Where delusion feigns reality

— Dean Bowman

About the Work

Author's Note: This poem crystallized during a period of questioning the permeable boundary between dreams and waking life. The lines arrived suddenly, distilling not just personal uncertainty about consciousness, but a recognition of our collective sleepwalk—drifting through self-constructed illusions while authentic connection to each other and the natural world slips away. If we rarely see reality as it truly is, how do we know we're awake?

Inspiration: A lucid dream transformed the familiar into something foreign and unknowable—transporting me back to a time I dared not revisit, carrying all my present knowledge into a past I'd rather forget. Even knowing I was dreaming couldn't end the dream; I had no power to command myself awake. That disorienting sensation of being conscious within sleep—yet doubting which state held truth—became the poem's emotional core.

Process: The original draft sprawled beyond three lines before I pared it to its essential elements. The challenge lay in creating depth through compression, allowing silence to carry as much weight as the words themselves.

Trivial Detail: "Asleep" began as a temporary title but proved irreplaceable—it captures the poem's central paradox of consciousness suspended between certainty and illusion.

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