"We really don't experience the world fully, because we're half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.”
And facing death changes that?
"Oh, yes. You strip away all that stuff and you focus on the essentials.

Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake.

The paradoxical situation with a vast number of people today is that they are half asleep when awake, and half awake when asleep, or when they want to sleep.

We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake.

We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.

We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.

Most of us walk unseeing through the world, unaware alike of its beauties, its wonders, and the strange and sometimes terrible intensity of the lives that are being lived about us.

A clearer picture of what is happening in the brain during non-REM sleep,14 during sleepwalking,15 and during confused arousals16 has been achieved through neuroimaging and EEG. It appears that the brain is half awake and half asleep: the cerebellum and brainstem are active, while the cerebrum and cerebral cortex have minimal activity. The pathways involved with control of complex motor behavior and emotion generation are buzzing, while those pathways projecting to the frontal lobe, involved in planning, attention, judgment, emotional face recognition, and emotional regulation are zoned out. Sleepwalkers don’t remember their escapades, nor can they be awakened by noise or shouts, because the parts of the cortex that contribute to sensory processing and the formation of new memories are snoozing, temporarily turned off, disconnected, and not contributing any input to the flow of consciousness.

When we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another.

Are you sure That we are awake? It seems to me That yet we sleep, we dream

If you think while you walk, you’re not really walking.

When one realizes one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake.

I remember that I'm invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

It’s one of those unpleasant opioid feverish half-sleep states, more a fugue-state than a sleep-state, less a floating than like being cast adrift on rough seas, tossed mightily in and out of this half-sleep where your mind’s
still working and you can ask yourself whether you’re asleep even as you dream. And any dreams you do have seem ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete.