I am a man who, above all, works while sleeping. When I say "I", I am referring to who I believe I really am: an entity that feels immaterial and double-aspected, cloistered within another entity, material and single-aspected, which contains and limits me. It likewise determines me in my being by condemning it to the finitude genetically programmed for it, but not for me (unless we are both two different manifestations of the same thing, something that I do not know for sure but deem possible).
Since I sleep only five hours at night (between four in the morning and nine in the morning), which I usually supplement with a nap in the late afternoon (at around seven or eight, or even nine; the duration of which is uncertain, though longer than that recommended by sleep "experts"), I have to admit that I work "a little bit".
However, once awake I am also active (for example, when I think or write, or when I obsessive-compulsively correct what I have written to try to bring it closer to the highest degree of perfection in terms of coherence, depth and argumentative solidity), albeit in another way, in a more emotional, more painful, more lacerating way... Because I am aware of the intense and continuous effort (unpaid, though not unpayable) that I make and have made throughout my life. That is a terrible and sad awareness: awareness of a life sentence to material poverty, but not to intellectual or moral poverty.
I affirm that I work while I sleep because it is in that long biographical constituted by sleep that most of my ideas, my projects, my productions and my creations are generated. When awake I intuit or perceive them; when asleep there is "someone" other than me who gives them being and presence: he gives them shape, orders them, selects them, classifies them and leaves them ready to come to light at the precise moment when that "other I" – which without considering my will or my opinion is imposed on me – deems it appropriate.
A few days ago, after waking up from my afternoon nap, I noticed a slight discomfort in my left temple. I gently touched it with the index finger of the same hand, and at once "he" reactivated a question that had been lingering in my mind for decades, without having it in mind at all for years: are optimists always right in the face of pessimists? Here is the argument he gave me:
A pessimist is someone who speaks of a "lost objects office", while the optimist refers to it as the "found objects office", which is the expression used by the French, an enlightened people if ever there was one: "le bureau des objets trouvés". Which of the two mental conceptions is in possession of truth?
This comparison is more challenging than the classic one: is the bottle half full or half empty? Because, usually, bottles that now have only have their original contents (whether of wine, water, oil, bleach, or other liquid, solid, gel or gas) were full when we bought them; therefore, after partial consumption, we will be making an excellent argument if we assess that they are half empty, not half full. This conclusion follows from the fact that if we continue using the product, the bottle will no longer be half empty, but rather completely empty.
On the contrary, in the example of the office mentioned earlier, this peculiarity does not exist since they are not objects that we refer to in respect of a certain initial state, which suggests that it is more appropriate to try to resolve in a rational and definitive way the dilemma posed about who is more correct in their assessments -- the pessimist or the optimist. In my opinion, by analysing it in detail, one arrives at the correct answer.
Although what has been discussed so far may seem like an arcane concern, in truth it is directly related to our daily experience.
To take a recent example, just yesterday I forgot a beautiful umbrella that had been given to me, very useful because its transparent canopy allowed me to avoid bumping into people or lampposts on gale days, when walking into the wind demands that it be carried with a forward tilt if you don't want it to be destroyed in a jiffy. I suspect it was on the city bus where I left it behind without realizing it. I'll ask for it at the lost objects office (or would it be the found objects office?); perhaps someone has picked it up and not run off with it. And even if that is not the case, I will not be sorry; I am convinced that if I had not misplaced it I would not have written this article. To the solace and delight of my readers, whether they are pessimistic or optimistic. Which is who I am.