sun is well up
our sleep--supposing our life fairly normal--is no longer truly sleep.
When the sun comes up the centers of active dynamic upper
consciousness begin to wake. The blood changes its vibration and even
its chemical constitution. And then we too ought to wake. We do
ourselves great damage by sleeping too long into the day. The
half-hour's sleep after midday meal is a readjustment. But the long
hours of morning sleep are just a damage. We submit our now active
centers of upper consciousness to the dominion of the blood-automatic
flow. We chain ourselves down in our morning sleep. We transmute the
morning's blood-strength into false dreams and into an ever-increasing
force of inertia. And naturally, in the same line of inertia we
persist from bad to worse.

With the result that our chained-down, active nerve-centers are
half-shattered before we arise. We never become newly day-conscious,
because we have subjected our powerful centers of day-consciousness to
be trampled and wasted into dreams and inertia by the heavy flow of
the blood-automatism in the morning sleeps. Then we arise with a
feeling of the monotony and automatism of life. There is no good,
glad refreshing. We feel tired to start with. And so we protract our
day-consciousness on into the night, when we _do_ at last begin to
come awake, and we tell ourselves we must sleep, sleep, sleep in the
morning and the daytime. It is better to sleep only six hours than to
prolong sleep on and on when the sun has risen. Every man and woman
should be forced out of bed soon after the sun has risen: particularly
the nervous ones. And forced into physical activity. Soon after dawn
the vast majority of people should be hard at work. If not, they will
soon be nervously diseased.

CHAPTER XV

THE LOWER SELF

So it comes about that the moon is the planet of our nights, as the
sun of our days. And this is not just accidental, or even mechanical.
The influence of the moon upon the tides and upon us is not just an
accident in phenomena. It is the result of the creation of the
universe by life itself. It was life itself which threw the moon apart
on the one hand, the sun on the other. And it is life itself which
keeps the dynamic-vital relation constant between the moon and the
living individuals of the globe. The moon is as dependent upon the
life of individuals, for her continued existence, as each single
individual is dependent upon the moon.

The same wi