The Realm Between Realms: Where Sleep Meets the Soul

There is a place we visit every night. A strange and fleeting realm that exists just as the world around us begins to blur and fade. It is not quite sleep. It is not quite wakefulness either. Some call it hypnagogia. Others call it the edge of dreams. I like to call it the realm between realms.

This place is slippery. It is the twilight zone of the mind. You might hear music that has never been played. You might see faces that do not exist. Your body might jolt as if falling through space. Your thoughts dissolve into symbols. Your name feels distant. The logical world grows quiet. Something else begins to speak.

Now here is the curious thing.

People who have come close to death often describe the same kind of experience. That same floaty feeling. That same sense of being outside the body. That same strange calm. Some see tunnels. Others speak to loved ones long gone. Some feel embraced by light itself.

This has been described across cultures and across time. The Greeks said sleep and death were brothers. They may have been onto something.

Science tells us that both sleep and death involve shifts in consciousness, slowing of the brainwaves, and a loosening of the ego’s grip. Mystics say both are a return to source. A going home. Maybe even a remembering.

Is the moment of death just a longer descent into the same mysterious sea we visit each night? Is it sleep without the promise of waking?

Maybe.

Or maybe that realm between realms is more than just a passage. Maybe it is a message. Maybe it is a reminder that we are more than flesh and thought. We are dreamers passing through a very convincing illusion. We are visitors in this body. We are stardust with a story.

Next time you drift off to sleep, notice the doorway. Notice what slips through. Notice the part of you that remembers how to fly.

Because perhaps, in the end, death is not a stop. It is a return to the dream. The big one.

The one we forgot we were dreaming all along.