Have you ever had a dream that you weren’t able to describe with your mouth?
It was a feeling that you intrinsically understood, and brooked no question or doubt. A vision that came to you and brought everlasting joy and understanding, a feeling of catharsis that you felt with incredible conviction. You’d wake up in the morning feeling like the situation was as it should be, and that you could not only cope with, but dominate the past, current, and future suffering during your life.
The problem with feelings like this is that they don’t last long. The end of remembering it begins when you’re awake for more than 30 seconds. The feeling is irresistibly pulled out of your grasp, forever on the tip of your tongue, drifting further away as you strain to reach for it and hold on tight to no avail.
While this is tragic, there’s a way to summon a shadow of it, and it’s pretty inconvenient. I call this shadow of true enlightenment “The Morning Voice”. Maybe not the sexiest term, but it sums it up for me and helps differentiate it from other voices that aren’t to be trusted.
The Morning Voice is summoned when you’re up way too early in the morning. Maybe you’ve had 6-7 hours of sleep, maybe less, but it’s definitely 4:00 am.
The world is silent, and only the most diligent/psychotic of people have risen. The leftover echoes of the connection you had with the universe while you were sleeping start whispering random cosmic wisdom into your ears.
For the time you were asleep, you knew all and everything, you saw the future and the past. During this time you could watch impassively, as a ghost in the parallel cosmos, as events took place that maybe would shatter your conscious self. All of it came and went, and all you felt was a sense of acceptance that most of us will never achieve in life.
It’s pretty good.
The magic time for this feeling is between 4:00 am to 6:00 am. I once experience it go on through to 8:00 am, and what a day that was! All or most of the best writing or personal work I’ve done has happened between those hours, and I’m pretty sure it’s because I was possessed by the Morning Voice.
It’s hard for me to pull off a successful summons these days. I start work at 6:00 am, and some of you may already know that I complain about it constantly. If I started work at a normal time, say, 8 or 9 am, then I could wake up early and do a bunch of personal work and write even MORE blogs (yay), all with the guidance of the Morning Voice.
There is something considerably raw and vulnerable about being awake that early in the morning. The mind is free of inhibition, and has been given free reign from self-control to wander where it will, and reveal to you perspectives you may not have considered. Thoughts and ideas simply flow without resistance. I have journals of stuff that I’ve written while half-awake inside an empty Starbucks, smelling coffee and jittering from the strange chill that comes with sleeplessness. I feel like that stuff is award-winning, but let’s let it lie for a few more years.
I’m always trying to ascend to this high whenever I take a coffee shop day. If it’s too late in the day, I won’t be able to be productive. My brain is too awake and full of doubt and criticism, and every idea I have is shot down by a saboteur of reality and skepticism. I wish I could have that guy killed, but it appears to come with the territory of existing in general.
I miss the Morning Voice. I heard it a few weeks ago, but it was through a dream. In that dream, I’d changed my LinkedIn status from “Video Editor & Generalist” to “Director & Writer”, and suddenly everything started working out in ways I could’ve never imagined. I have never put the “Director” status on my professional pages – it seemed presumptuous, and I thought I’d get hired in the film industry a lot faster if I’d marketed myself as an editor.
I woke up that morning feeling a sense of hope that I thought was lost to me.
It took me about a week to get my shit together, but if you visit my LinkedIn page right now, you’ll notice that I’ve changed it. Things haven’t started looking up the way they did in the dream, but I’ve actually gotten some emails from random consulting companies. I’ve even had one interview, which is mind-boggling since I was aggressively applying back in 2016/2017 and was only interviewed once – for my current job.
It is refreshing to know that sometimes the answers live in the depths of our brains, even if we aren’t aware of them. No one can tell you want to do except yourself, so it’s nice to get instructions every once in a while.