Sleeping Astronauts

She surrenders, and he dominates.

Before I begin, I'd like to bring you two images to encourage and sustain this article.

• The first is the famous story of Sleeping Beauty, who lies in a dense forest of thorns at the moment of her sleep.

• The second is the archetype, often repeated in films, of the Lonely Astronaut: stern, deeply emotionally wounded by loss and bereavement. In the silent cold of outer space, he learns to deal with the intensity of his emotions while battling internal and external monsters—the one who overcomes cosmic forces, always inside a suit that protects him from inhospitable environments.

These two images seem part of different fantasies, distant symbolic universes. However, I aspire to bring out their common membranes, which describe so much in the paradoxical ways we hold the world.

Sleeping Beauty

The first printed version of Sleeping Beauty appeared in 1528 in Paris in a book of novels called Perceforest. It is known that in the oral tradition, it had been in circulation since at least 1300, ending its long metamorphosis with the 1910 version of the tale we know today. The earliest variant of this tale appears in oral tradition around the 14th century as "Troilus and Zelandina", where a disgruntled deity casts a curse on the young princess Zelandina, causing her to fall into a deep sleep. Many years later, Prince Troilus finds the princess and rapes her in her sleep. As a result, she has a son.

In the book Tales of the Serpent and the Moon, I followed some eco-mythical clues about this tale, such as:

• The preservation of ancestral structures of archetypal records of initiatory practices, pilgrimages and sacrifices, i.e. sacred rituals and ceremonies —the Sleeping Beauty pricking herself on the spindle and her ecstatic sleep.

• The rapt and incubating sleep are analogous to the hibernation of bears and the sleep of the enchanted maiden, which refers to mythical practices of collective dreaming and shamanic journeys through sacred geographies —She Who Sleeps is the priestess who sees everyone's transformation. She is the one who dreams of us.

• In the Brothers Grimm version, the bee, with its buzzing, is instrumental in waking the sleeping maiden.

• There is also the Italian version of the girl who enters a sleeping trance and is magically conceived by ingesting a rose petal. This echoes the archaic image of herbal and magical fertilization —reflecting a primitive time when humans still came from trees.

We, therefore, find many ecological clues in Sleeping Beauty, which remind us of her mythical antiquity. She is a golden representative of nature, the daughter of roses, protected by thorns, and aware of bears and bees' seasonal and primal wisdom. Her sleep is an initiation and ecstatic surrender to the territory of the Other World, a temporal metamorphosis, a treading of ancestral and collective paths. She is The One Who Sleeps, the one who sacrifices and surrenders to the living paths of mystery, the one who dreams the dreams of the world.

But today, with the loss of ecosystemic wisdom, she is abandoned, vulnerable, and orphaned. She is lost in a maze nightmare, with the world adrift, without anyone to dream it, because no one knows its mythical geography anymore. Her dream is no longer participatory and integrative in an ecological dialogue but deeply dissociative, an attempt to escape and forget the violence she has suffered.

Lonely astronaut

In modern techno-scientific fantasies, the lonely astronaut lost in space has become commonplace in entertainment narratives. He hasn't been initiated, doesn't sleep, and is presented as a hero who sacrifices himself for the good of humanity. For him, sleep is avoided, and it is even painful. He regulates every detail to stay in control of his perpetual escape.

But this is precisely where the dimensions of the two meet: the lonely astronaut and the sleeping maiden. In cryopreservation fantasies, sleep is the bridge to vast space-time travel, similar to ecstatic sleep in Shamanic journeys through mythical geographies.

The lost astronaut represents the archetype of a man exiled from his body and emotions, always wrapped in a safety suit/armour, but one that distances him from sensory participation - the metaphor of hyper-individualistic exceptionalism. A man who feels the victim of tragic loss and rejection without the ability to mourn or weep. He finds himself alone in outer space, as an insensitive expert, abandoned and impossible to rescue, in confrontation with his memories and shadows.

It is from this cosmic and dreamlike space that the emotional cascade is unleashed, where he begins to feel again, being trapped by the vastness of space and where repressed emotions devour him; it is here that the monsters finally digest him and make him cry, howl and scream for all the losses he couldn't speak or feel. Still trapped in the static and isolated category of the hero, he struggles against himself. It is in this cosmic space that is as empty as it is deafening, as inhospitable as it is beautiful, that he falls to his knees again. This is where he finds himself and regains the ability to care and feel, far from everyone, far from Earth.

But technology is no substitute for the Dream

This puerile techno-scientific heroic fantasy, so normalized in the symbolic system of the culture in which we find ourselves, is a projection of the patriarchal and colonial culture that imagined it. The sidereal journeys are dreamlike reveries, sketched against the backdrop of the illusion of control and superiority of modern technology. Although it is the tale of Sleeping Beauty that is considered childish.

Sleeping Beauty leads the way through the initiation of the spindle, the drop of blood, or menstruation, in an ancestral echo of welcoming and retreating to the Earth. He flees up there, pained and sorrowful, on a transcendent quest to save everyone. While she sleeps, everything stops, and nature grows, but while he saves, everything continues far away on Earth. His is a fantasy of world collapse, but hers is one of regeneration, even through the violation expressed in the first forms of the tale, which generates a baby, a symbol of fertility. Sleeping Beauty is part of an animist and seasonal legacy, while The Lonely Astronaut is a modern, absolutist fantasy of technological control. She speaks of curiosity, and he of desperation. She stays and he goes. She surrenders, and he dominates.

Psychologically, we find ourselves in the middle of these two narratives, in a step of amnesia and devaluation of the ancestral wisdom of She Who Sleeps, and in the idealization of normality, recognition and appreciation of the Astronaut as the necessary solitary hero.

We continue to ignore the loss of ecosystemic wisdom, abandoning the dreams of the Earth, idealizing leaving its vast body that welcomes and generates us, and fantasizing about salvation while we keep the Earth captive and gagged. We lose ourselves in maze-like nightmares, with the world collapsing without anyone to dream it, exiling the creative possibilities of collective dreams. We're like sleeping astronauts who don't want to wake up from their hero fantasy.

But technology has never replaced the dream.