WHEN YOU CAN'T SLEEP

There is a Japanese legend that states that if you cannot fall asleep it means that you are awake in another person's dream.

How interesting.

LOST had several key trigger words or concepts: awakening, dreams, alternative reality, changes in time and space.

But what is a better representation of an alternate reality or change in time and space than dreams?

Even another person's dreams that affects you.

It is not that the person who cannot sleep knows about, or controls the other person's dream. It is probably the exact opposite. When one tosses aimlessly trying to get to sleep, you are restless and not in a dream state. It is like the actual dreamer has pulled the mechanism for your dreams, your subconscious REM dream state, from you to power their vivid imagination with your appearance, words, character and personality.

Would this be a dream thief in action?  No, because they are not "your" dreams since you are still awake.

The idea that a heavy, deep thinking dreamer can attach their mental thought waves to other people to harvest and extract "better" more lucid dreams is a fascinating collision of philosophy and science fiction.

Through the series, we rarely saw any of the main characters actually sleeping. They were constantly on the move, in day light and at night. And over time, they did look tired. Their mental faculties were low. (How many times did we complain that the characters failed to ask basic questions to people coming back from a mission?) The island characters were the ones who were sleep deprived for a reason.

It still could be associated with a Dharma experiment on weaponizing dreams for the military. Or it could be that the stress levels and electromagnetic properties of the island interfered with anyone getting REM sleep (the biological basic need to rest and recharge one's internal batteries). Prolonged non-sleep can make people forgetful, irritable, and psychotic.  

But what does the original legend mean?

It may be a philosophical means to explain how being awake can be expressed on different levels of reality. Being in another persons dream for example can simply mean that person has interest in you or it can actually be a theoretical idea that you exist many different places at once.

In LOST, we presume that the main characters were in two different places (island world and the sideways plain of existence) at the same time. The sideways people could not "remember" their island pasts until "they were awakened."  Since the sideways world was the after life, it could be equated that the main characters were "restless ghosts" who could not come to terms with their pasts. 

Or it could mean that in each person, we have many people: we have our biologic human form that is transfixed to this planet. We may also have a spiritual form which rests inside our body, but it can be released into a different plain of existence. Perhaps, people whose "soul" has left their living body are suddenly defenseless against the temptations and evil urges that plague mankind. 

In the sideways world, the characters did not reunite with their bodies. Their souls "remembered" their past - - - their island past and their friendships, the missing pieces in their lives.