A very warm welcome to you🤗
Through my own experience, I've found 3am can either feel like heaven on earth or hell on earth, so to speak. A lot depends on what I tap into. If I tap into the stresser in me or everything that's stressful in life, it can feel like hell. Same goes for tapping into whatever leads me or has led me to become deeply depressed. On the other hand, if I make that connection or create the kind of channel that leads me to tap into whatever it is I need or whatever it is that serves me, it undeniably feels like heaven on earth. I suppose you could say it's about whatever we meditate on or are 100% focused on.
So, the question becomes 'What is going to lead me to experience some form of heaven on earth at 3am?'. This is where the imagination comes into play. You could even call it a form of daydreaming in a way, where it's about going into the place you want to go into. In the imagination you can meet with anyone or anything. For example, if you want to meet with the sage in you, imagining going through a gateway or doorway into the place where you're going to meet that sage can be the first step. Where you find them and what they look like can be up to you. The next step is possibly the hardest and that involves asking a question you need an answer to and then not thinking. The answer comes thoughtlessly. It just pops in as a vision (imagine) or as words (inner dialogue). In bringing a cup of tea to the table, to begin with, the 3am meditation becomes somewhat of a ritual or practice you set yourself up for. Personally, I'm a coffee kinda gal. It actually took me decades to finally work out that 3 or 4am is where visions can be at their clearest and inner dialogue is at its 'loudest'. This can help explain why it can be a time of great sufferance or a time that can feel like a blessing or opportunity.
With imagination being an 'each to their own' kind of thing, as I've mentioned we're free to imagine whatever it is or whoever it is we want to meet with in there. Some people might choose to meet with some inner part of them, some might choose to meet with someone divine such as Buddha or Jesus or someone else (aka a form of prayer), some may wish to meet with a passed loved one who always proved themself to be a great guide, some may meet with their future self while asking 'How did I manage to get through this time in my life? What needed to change, that which I cannot see right now?'. There's no limit. The goal is to come out of this form of mediation with an answer, solution, revelation or some form of direction. Not always easy to do, depending on where we're at in our life.
If we choose, 3am is where we can meet with a leader of the imagination. In other words, it can be a time of becoming immersed in a book, where the author leads us to imagine everything in that story. Audio books could be more so what works for us. It could also be a time where we find a great leader in guided meditation, through another form of audio guidance. Plenty of guided meditations out there, whether they involve crystal caves, rain forests or whatever. It can be about finding the one or the ones that suit us, personally.
Btw, I can relate to the 'committee meeting' factor. There are definitely times where the stresser in me, the pessimist, the harsh and brutal critic and all those kind of inner facets all get together. It can become incredibly stressful and/or hopeless until some other part comes in to dictate 'All of you, shut the hell up'😅. And it can feel like hell at times. Consciously inviting whatever it is that's going to lead us or raise us out of that hellish dialogue becomes the key.
