In A Perfect World: Sleepwalking

To be a child is to live in a dream world. When I think back on my childhood, memories come back in snatches: happy moments, funny moments, painful or sad or exciting moments. The big picture was made up of a million small day-to-day snapshots, and therefore largely invisible to my childish self. Past and future are only a vague blur when the present is your whole world. There was no sense of a larger universe encasing my own little one.

That’s the way a child perceives life. Things come and go, with no explanation and little understanding. Events happen to them, or around them, unlinked to context. Feelings bubble up in response to whatever the world throws at them, only to be replaced by other feelings in response to the next set of stimuli. It’s a fragmented world. Most of all, it’s a small world.

I’ve often returned to a certain theme in these columns called self-awareness. Usually, I’ve referenced the term with regard to our inner lives: the feelings, traumas and triggers that motivate our emotional reactions, often without our conscious knowledge. Growing up, we’ve said, involves gaining an awareness of the forces that live within, so that we can subdue and shape and direct them. But there’s more.

Self-awareness also means finding our place within the larger world. Learning how to tuck our small childhood existence into a larger, grown-up framework. This involves becoming aware of the issues that propel and dominate adult life, so that we can figure out who we are and where we stand.

If childhood is like a dream, kids basically sleepwalk through it. They inhabit a dream landscape of immediate, here-and-now experiences and emotions. Like sleepers lost in a dream, the bubble in which they live is their whole world. Their parents, siblings and extended family, their teachers and classmates and playmates, school in the winter and fun in the summer are all there is. All they need to know or think about.

Growing up involves not only stretching the perimeter but also shattering the dream. As the borders of our understanding begin to expand and we start to better comprehend life, the landscape we once believed to be eternally firm and smooth can be bulldozed out of all recognition.

Sometimes kids grow up too fast because of some dramatic upheaval or catastrophe. More often, the blade that plows up the earth beneath our feet can be nothing more traumatic than time itself.

Holding On

A healthy adult lives in the real world. Clinging to non-reality may be a sign of mental illness, or it could stem from an emotional deficit that has a person holding on tight to something that ought to long ago have receded into the past. Once childhood is over, so must its trappings and beliefs be.

Growing up means stepping out of the dream world of innocent, carefree childhood and into the real one where there is great beauty, nobility and goodness, but also nasty deficits such as violence, betrayal and corruption. A place of politics and war. Of building edifices and rebuilding them when they fall. Of plans to be made and bills to be paid. Somewhere within that huge real place, we carve out our personal space.

An individual who has not moved emotionally past childhood may not look like the classic “beach bum” but, like that bum, refuses to engage with the world in a mature and productive way. The so-called “Peter Pan” syndrome refers to people who insists on living as if they never have to grow up. This places a huge burden on those who are forced to pick up the slack for them. Even worse, it doesn’t allow them to do what they were put on this earth to accomplish.

Wanting to live irresponsibility is one thing; childhood trauma is another. If a person is frozen at the precise emotional age in which they experienced trauma, they require enormous compassion and probably professional help to assist them over that deeply buried hurdle. Though they may perform well on a practical or intellectual level, their emotional responses to life will typically be on a par with someone far younger than their actual age.

On the outside, they are responsible and even high-functioning adults. Inside, they are children crying out for what they’ve lost.

Waking Up

If childhood is a dream, then adolescence can be compared to being rudely woken from a sound sleep. The disorienting and sometimes brutal moment when you’re torn from slumber and thrust, willingly or not, into the waking world.

Once they’re fully arrived in that world, they’ll be fine. It’s the transition that can be rocky. Maybe that’s why teenagers are typically moody. The passage from childhood to adulthood is not always an easy one.

The transition comes with brilliant flashes of understanding plus moments of acute embarrassment. “Why didn’t I ever notice that before?” “Oh! Now I know what that means…” Suddenly, the jigsaw pieces of the child’s life come together to form a picture she was never able to grasp. Clues trickle in to explain old mysteries. New and different aspects of the world swim into her previously narrow orbit. The free-floating now of childhood becomes attached to a meaningful past and a hopeful future.

Growing up means abandoning impulse and, to a large degree, childlike spontaneity. It involves thinking about things that may not always be pleasant or easy to wrap our brains around. And it means responding to them.

It means letting go of the yearning for the kind of happy-ever-after endings routinely fed to children in storybooks. Gaining the maturity needed to redefine happiness, and to see that even unhappy endings can also be brand-new beginnings.

Ignorance is Bliss… Sometimes

The saying that “ignorance is bliss” may well apply to youngsters. They’re entitled to their ignorance, but we’re not. Awareness of our own inner workings and of the world’s outer workings is our responsibility to attain. It’s the basis for a realistic and purposeful life. Childhood may be sweet, but mature awareness makes life truer and richer. Even if the awareness necessarily comes along with some pain.

We can be tempted to deny unpalatable realities. If something painful intrudes upon our consciousness but we feel helpless to fix it, we may act dismissively, brushing it away like an annoying mosquito. This is as unhelpful as it is futile. The child who’s acting out in school won’t suddenly settle down because you don’t feel like dealing with it. Troubled marriages don’t usually turn wonderful all on their own. Problems come up and must be attended to, whether or not we want to acknowledge them.

Attractive as the thought of sleepwalking through our days might be, life doesn’t usually let us do so for long.

Nor should it. Childhood is meant to be a prelude. It’s a preparation, not a permanent way of life. Awareness is a vital tool for a successful adult life. There’s no point burying one’s head in the sand, because reality won’t be denied. Embracing ignorance just leaves a person… ignorant. We grow by coping with reality, and we become wise by figuring out how.

Kids lack a radar for nuance. As we grow, we learn to probe beneath the surface to sense the subtler parts of our own and others’ personalities. As we gain experience, we learn to make connections between seemingly disparate things and to better understand how the world works. Pretending that people or situations are strictly black and white is just another form of sleepwalking.

This necessary and fascinating education is called Learning How to be an Adult Human Being. Rough as it can sometimes be, it’s a class we simply don’t have the option of skipping.

Tempting as it is to stay snug in bed and dreaming, to be human is to be wide awake. Not dreaming, and certainly not sleepwalking. The road is too bumpy for that. A sleepwalker runs the risk of tripping over the rough patches, not to mention courting oblivion to the needs of those around him.

Walking through life with one’s eyes closed also means missing out on some really glorious scenery along the way. Both the obvious kind, and the kind that we must develop grown-up eyes to see.