Reflections of a Retired Pilot on Sleep and Awareness

There is a moment known to anyone who has lived long with the night… a moment that arrives without noise, without warning. You wake for no reason, at an hour that belongs neither to the fullness of night nor the promise of dawn— just a quiet interruption in a sleep you thought was steady.

I write this today not merely as a reader or observer, but as a retired pilot who spent long years flying through darkness. More than half of my flights were at night, and my sleep—by the nature of the profession— was scattered between day and night, between takeoff and landing, across time zones that never respected the order of the clock.

Perhaps for that reason, I never learned to see sleep as a fixed structure… but rather as a shifting experience, more like a journey than a routine.

In our modern lives, we have learned to interpret waking in the night as a flaw.
We call it “insomnia,” we worry about it, we try to fix it. But after years of living within a system that does not recognize stable sleep, I began to wonder: is the problem truly in waking… or in how we have been taught to understand it?

Sleep, it seems, is not merely a biological need. It is also an idea— an idea of how we should sleep, how long, and when.

Over time, this idea has hardened into a rigid standard, by which humans are measured like machines. Eight uninterrupted hours… a model that appears logical,
yet often resembles work schedules more than human reality.

From experience, and later reflection, I came to realize that the night was never a single block. It was always an open space— with pauses, with unexpected silences.

During my flights, I would see sleeping cities from above, and know that somewhere below, someone was awake… thinking, writing, worrying,
or simply staring at the ceiling— as I sometimes did.

In those moments, when a person wakes without reason, they are not always victims of disorder.
Sometimes, they have simply entered a rare space of awareness— a space untouched, undisturbed.

But the world we live in today does not welcome such spaces. It is a world of order, precision, and calculation— one that leaves no room for gaps.

Sleep has become a function: efficient, continuous, measurable. And anything that falls outside this model is quickly labeled— a defect, a problem, a condition to be treated.

And so, not only has sleep changed… but our feeling toward it has changed. We no longer trust our inner rhythm. Instead, we measure ourselves against a single standard— even when it does not fit us.

What I am trying to say is not a rejection of science, nor a dismissal of the importance of regular sleep. It is something simpler: an invitation to reconsider our relationship with those moments when we wake without explanation.

When you wake in the middle of the night, do not rush to judge yourself.
Do not immediately assume something is wrong.

Try, instead, to meet that moment as it is— as part of your experience, not a deviation from it. You may not write a poem, you may not discover a great idea.
Perhaps you will only sit in silence.

But even that silence— in a world that never stops speaking— has value.

I write this today because, after years of flying through nights and sleeping through days, I came to understand that the human being is not a machine set to a single rhythm.

We are beings who change, who adapt, who constantly seek our own balance. And perhaps… in those small moments when we wake for no reason, we are closest to ourselves.

Wisdom: Not every awakening in the night is a sign of something wrong…
sometimes, it is simply a quiet reminder that within you, there is a rhythm still alive— even if the world tries to regulate it.