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.  

MYTHS OF DEMI-GODS

In Greek mythology and other cultures, there are stories about the heavenly gods coming down to Earth to mess with the human population. Sometimes, these gods mate with human females, creating a hybrid off-spring which other gods try to eliminate. These demi-gods have half human and half-god like traits. They may have magical powers, but still be mortal.

Under the background of these stories, the off-spring are usually hidden away from the gods in order to protect them from destruction. Sometimes they are banished by the gods to a faraway place so their mere presence will not upset the gods' rule over humanity. At times, these off-spring are cursed by the gods so they could have no human interaction, such as the ability to turn men into stone.

As such, these stories may be relevant to the island guardian. The ones we have seen, like Crazy Mother and Jacob, appear to be immortal, with magical powers but yet have the ability to die under certain circumstances.

Perhaps, the initial island guardian was a demi-god, banished to this remote island. One of its magical powers is the ability to turn human beings into smoke monsters. With the essence of human souls trapped in smoke form, they would be trapped on the island prison with their host, the demi-god.

We saw the smoke monster take many human forms. However, that does not eliminate the possibility that there were more than one smoke monster on the island. The whispers, the trapped souls who have no physical form, may be like cloaks that a smoke monster absorbs in order to create a human form.

What damage does one do by banishing a supernatural being to a deserted island to live their eternity alone? You try to find loopholes in order to bring things to the island "for play." Jacob was all about playing games; and his manipulation of Alpert to Ben Linus was all a part of an elaborate game that Jacob made up the rules as it went along. In one way, this may be a childlike game of "tag." Jacob was looking to find a person to be "it," the new guardian, so his prison sentence or banishment would be over.

LITTLE PEOPLE

There is an ancient Celt legend on the Isle of Man that says it was once inhabited by a band of Little People who had magical powers that could transport humans into other realms, only to return hundreds of years later.

The concept of alien abductions, disappearing ships and aircraft in time vortexes, and strange electromagnetic properties of Earth's hot spots, have bolstered the concept of inter-dimensional transport to new worlds or new universes.  Consistent with these theories is the suspension of mortality in the travelers. They allegedly return to Earth as if only a day had passed when in fact it had been a century.

So these portal dimensions must be a place where there is no linear time line. A place where there is no concept of past, present or future just mere existence. Sound familiar? That was how the sideways world was explained.

It could be a reasonable definition for the after life. A mortal soul must travel somewhere to become immortal. It is why Christian told Jack that some of his friends died "long" before and "long" after his own demise, but they did not skip a beat living in the sideways realm.

How could that be?

Well, if you reverse the Earth's Little People's mythology, one can imagine that the souls in the sideways spirit world were abducted or taken to the island realm in order to experience new things, work out problems, or become re-acquainted with humanity.  This would suppose that the linear time elements of the human souls would be 1) flashbacks, to 2) sideways world, to 3) island realm, then back to 2) sideways world conclusion.

In ancient Egyptian culture, this chain of events is described as a soul's journey through an underworld. It could live in human body form in another dimension without knowing its own fate. It could think that it is living a human existence when in fact it is a second life. In this second life, the souls eat, drink, marry, fight, and die. So why would there be a need for a second life in the scheme of the after life?

If the lesson is that one cannot move on without sufficient bonds of love and friendship, than that is what occurred in the sideways church.  Without the characters having experienced the island tangent, they would have never experienced the deep bonds they missed during their earthly existence. One can imagine reincarnation of multiple existences in order to awaken one's final spirit.

SUNKEN ISLAND

According to a Celtic legend, there was an island approximately 120 miles west of Ireland in the North Atlantic called Hy Brasil. This island vanished from view a long time ago. According to Irish myth, the island is a phantom island, cloaked in mist, but which makes its appearance for one day every seven years. But no one can seem to find it, even though sailors have tried to map it since the early 1300s.

The island was supposedly inhabited by a race of super-intelligent people, who had technologies thousands of years ahead of its time.

Some theorize that this ancient legend follows the pattern of that of Atlantis. Atlantis was also a place ruled by highly intelligent people who were much more advanced than normal tribes roaming the continents. But Atlantis somehow vanished from the face of the earth, and any ruins of their civilization have not been found.

Which gets us back to the submerged island scene from Season 6 of LOST.

Many viewers thought this was a clue to the premise of the series that the island was Atlantis. The island had been described as a place, a ship, a space craft, a time portal, a localized worm hole, an illusion, a dream, a game and a time-space vortex. If one can find the answer of what the island was, then that should explain the other unsolved mysteries.

Just as a few have tried to tie the advanced Atlantis civilization to unexplained artifacts like Stonehedge or the Bermuda Triangle, it is hard to connect disconnected dots on map. Atlantis legends state that the island country was in the Atlantic Ocean. Our LOST island was in the Pacific. Atlantis was said to have a highly advanced technology. Our LOST island technology apparently stopped with the Dharma construction in the late 1970s-early 1980s. So there seems to be little connection between the legend of Atlantis and LOST's island except that they were mysterious islands that explorers could not find.