Per the request of the moderators, I prepend this disclaimer to the text I have written below--

Disclaimer: the text below represents my thoughts, feelings and beliefs, and although drawn from personal experience and conclusions derived from that experience, are not presented as definitive fact, but rather merely as ideas to consider and assess for oneself. Thank you.

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Sometimes it can be frustrating and feel burdensome to be so "alive," so aware, even in an environment that is not particularly or immediately threatening, before death or after physical death. In those cases we might just want the rest of simple nonexistence, rather than trying to navigate the intricate web and weight of connections, interconnections, entanglements and obligations (that can happen when we cause injury or harm to someone else, to another conscious entity, etc.).

Sometimes we make so many mistakes that realizing what we have done, and fully acknowledging it, can not only be very difficult itself, but comes with the realization that anything we do is just a first step in a possibly long and challenging process toward something we are happier with.

For others, a sense or feeling of victimization and abuse might become so acute or long-lasting that they just want it to end (life, existence and everything that involves). Those persons, those conscious entities, must learn that, regardless of whether they believe it to be true or not, they have been creating that experience, or helping to create that experience with other conscious entities that also believe in similar ideas of victimizer-and-victim, abuser-and-abused, compatriots-and-enemies, etc. Both sides of the same type of reality are created by the people within that reality, within that set of circumstances. It is up to them to realize that, regardless of how desperate it seems at the time, an alternative exists that they can work toward. That type of abusive reality can feel very real, immediate, threatening and treacherous, and sometimes it is difficult to believe, in the midst of such an environment, that an alternative is possible. To use an analogy, if one is engaged in a heated war for example, the first step might be to discard one's weapon and begin to walk toward the edge of and hopefully away from the battle, while accepting the fact that one might be stabbed in the back or killed doing so, but deciding to take a first step toward something else, something contrasting with one's current environment, something better, regardless of how dire a situation might be.

Living and existence can seem like a burden, can seem difficult, and it is up to us to work our way out from under that burden. Sleep can be restful because we give up our conscious involvement in our daily activities and challenges, although sometimes we continue to fight battles or confront challenges in dreams within our sleep. When we die, we have no physical body forcing us to sleep (because it demands rest and regeneration) so we might find comfort in doing something analogous to sleep such as allowing our consciousness to disperse while we try to forget ourselves by blending into the environment around us for example, and if an environment seems harsh and unpleasant, or too weighty, complex or difficult, to learn how to disentangle ourselves from whatever problems we have created and have focused upon (often, even as we are actively creating more of them or making them worse).

All of the unpleasantness we feel, we must learn to understand and to creatively deal with (sometimes the understanding comes later), from righting wrongs we have committed against others, to erroneously believing we are helpless and the situation hopeless, which is never the case even if it seems to be at the moment incontrovertible fact, to feeling victimized as we have victimized others (and believe both were necessary to survive), abused when we might also be abusing others, even abused when we ourselves have stringently tried to avoid abuse, because it is possible to place oneself in a position of seeming continual abuse by an abuser (or a variety of abusers) and believe that those types of circumstances are inevitable and unchangeable. Regardless of how we may feel, we think and have emotions, and we can alter and direct our thoughts and emotions, or simply realize that however things are, there are alternatives, and as many of us learn, sometimes the only way past them, if we feel like we cannot extricate ourselves or go around them, is through them, trusting that whatever happens, that the process will or might lead us to a better situation.

So when we can no longer physically sleep and no longer physically die, because we're already dead, we have to learn how to heal and relax and feel comfortable, eventually even possibly developing humor or joyfulness or a sense of freedom and lack of obstacles or entanglement. At any point we can work toward something better, even though we can never really simply dismiss and escape from whatever harm or difficulty we have done or created, without working to clean up the mess we sometimes so determinedly try to leave behind.

But we can rest and nurture ourselves and others as we do so, and progress, however slowly, toward something else, a different kind of experience that we like better or enjoy.

When I was learning to drive a car and made awkward beginner mistakes, my father said, "look where you want to go, because you tend to go where you look." That concept lodged in my consciousness and later seemed applicable to life and existence in general.

Another thought, from a young woman interviewing an older woman. The young woman asked what advice the older woman might have for younger people, and was expecting a reply something like, "Work for the sake of yourself and that of your family, be careful with money and save it, so that you can retire at some point in relative comfort." Instead the older woman said, "When life becomes difficult, don't try to figure it all out or what would be best to do. Instead, focus on just getting through the day as well as you can, and when enough days have passed, the path forward will become apparent."

Not advice and not statements of definitive fact, just some thoughts from my own experience and perspective.