I’ve been doing alot of reading lately about the experiences of Aldus Huxley and others who have attempted to describe their experiences “outside of time”, when they could touch the ‘eternal’. It’s really easy to whimsically castigate these guys as prone to ‘flights of fancy’ (epistemologically) or poopoo their prose as ‘self-defense’ (psychologically). How oft it is that I wish I’d chased that rabbit down the hole! I wanted to become a cultural anthropologist long long ago.
I s’pose I could ramble for ages ABOUT what I want to say, and never even get to it, and besides…. it’s coming up on 5 am already. 2nd consecutive night with less than 3 hrs sleep — is this causing me brain-damage? It sure feels like it. Sooooooooo… (here goes).
I just had a dream. It was quite a strange dream. When I awoke, it was as if I was being compressed back into my body, a rather congested and uncomfortable squeeze. Consequently, I was panting a bit and my heart racing. Stranger still, I realized (or had been dreaming) that I was returning from a thought thread, upon which I had been traveling. It’s only been an hour or so since I woke up, but it’s all fading so quickly now, and I really don’t want to add or elaborate in any way which will inauthenticate what I experienced. Still, I’d like to deconstruct this just a bit.
If my memory is not being creative now, I think my very next thought was awareness of what I had been doing before (not sure whether immediately before, or whether I had been on the thread for some time —- not that a thought thread has any real relationship to time). Before that, I had travelled on triangles. Which is a greater leap in terms of technology, complexity, or difficulty? I don’t know. All I know is that it was much more easy to move along a throught than it is to move in time-space.
As I lay there in bed, I kept trying to probe EXACTLY what I was feeling. Was I somehow hiding something from myself ?!? — the way that you can conveniently forget a nightmare sometimes, but still KNOW that you just had one, and that is was not pleasant at all. Heck, I wasn’t sleeping and now curiosity was building. What a STRANGE DREAM!!!! Was that really what I was dreaming about? Why would a person dream something so odd? Maybe I should have taken that undergrad class in dream interpretation so many years ago.
Like any short-term memory, I didn’t have to “access” it because it was within my immediate awareness in the same way as the imprint of your intentionality and purpose when you leave the house to go to work (as I shall in a few hours now. UGH!!). Because of this awareness, it was different than the experience that you might have when questioning some childhood or otherwise very faint memory. When the glimmer has begun to fade, and all you really have are outlines, or worse still – the copy of a copy of a copy (ad infinitum) after retelling it (to yourself or others), then you really DON’T know for sure, whether and to what degree embellishments or explanations have become part of the story, rather than meta information added later.
For these reasons, it was really difficult for me to doubt that this indeed was exactly what my mind had been doing before, this and no more, no less. All I knew about traveling on triangles at that point, was that it was similar in some regard to travelling on the threads of throught in that it was outside of normal space-time. The last detail I will record now is the only other detail not constructed but as part of the experience itself. Which is this: that when traveling on a thread of consciousness, I had spread out somehow, and yet was able to move forwards and backwards (like moving along a ticker tape which had been recording consciousness). Even when moving backwards, I could understand the meanings of the thought and how they were connected to their prior thoughts.
That’s really all I could remember. In order then, I awoke. I was breathing a bit heavy, and heart faster than when awaking from a calm slumber (as you would for instance, if you merely needed to use the restroom). Upon awaking I could recall what I was doing mentally just prior to awaking (what I was dreaming). I lay there questing this dream for a good half-hour, and came to the conclusion that I could not recall more and yet what I could recall, was solid and needed no retractions. At this point, I began to toy a bit, intellectually. Wondering what the heck it means to travel on a triangle?
Is that like folding time-space, like in Dune? I wasn’t sure, because I couldn’t remember at this point what in the heck that meant or how I had done it. Pure speculation now. If you have many triangles before you, and you begin to fold them, then certainly the distance to the edge of those triangles will diminish, right? And for that matter, how could consciousness exist outside of space-time, and yet somehow interact with matter and energy inside space-time?!
Sheeshh. almost 5:30 now.
