Question: If you were dreaming right now, do you think you would sense the presence of the you who was dreaming? The presence of your sleeping self?
If you could, do you think you would recognize yourself as that presence?
I ask because this evening, I was out in town. The sun was below the horizon, but the sky was still a luminous (if ominous) grey. The lights of the town suddenly seemed to become more distinct, more vivid, with a strange depth. Despite the people and the traffic and the shops all around, I could feel the miles of snowy landscape around me, like a sort of echo.
It all felt slightly unreal. Memories flitted through my head not quite at random - us standing outside the art museum in the November wind, you and me on that drive from Texas to the Midwest. Other, things, too. It all felt similar somehow.
It wasn't just cold grue, but layers of it, like layers of time.
The radio played "wrapped around your finger" and it all felt so haunted that I began to question it, the meaning of it. It was as if I were hearing the song in its proper setting for the first time, the proper context, which allowed me to detect an essence I'd never noticed before. Something liminal. What was it I sensed?
My stream of consciousness was like so:
Underworld landscape. What would it feel like if you were dead and didn't know it? Would it feel like this? No, not quite. We are not entirely ghosts. We are something else. Has the rest the world disappeared, has the real world been obliterated and left this shadowy world behind? No, not quite that, either.
And what was the eerie, nameless presence in the atmosphere?
When running through all the iterations of what this was like, I realized that it was most like a dream, but as seen from the other side.
As if I were in the dream without knowing that I was being dreamed.
Except for the nameless, eerie presence of something unknown.
***
It's been a few days since this happened, and I'm still thinking about it. Would you recognize your own presence out of context? The remnants of your own energy in a place where you used to live?
Or (as my husband pointed out) the presence of your higher self, the eternal self that already knows all?
I told him, if that were the case, I could think of two times such an awareness could become evident: if your higher self intervened to nudge you in a necessary direction, or that you, in your physical existence, had become so nebulous that you began to blend into that other world.
I still wonder which one I experienced.
But I suspect I know.
