Hello, you good?
Today I'm writing for the purpose of recreation and elation. I spent at least the last day in my overused bed, dreaming a little, and machinating a little, and although I can't recall the entire depth of every scene I imagined whilst asleep, I can remember snippets, and I want to put some down; those I can remember.
There I am in school; and now, I recall, it was my first day of secondary. I'm sitting at the back of class, but it is not unlike the theme that I am a forty two year old gone back to relive the experience. The teacher appears to be my old history teacher, Miss Adams, and Ballard is here, and Andrews, and Alexandrou, and Alden, plus some of the girls, and there is a cupboard that was never there at the time.
With my new attitude, or rather my current attitude, to study, this makes getting on with work an easy task. I am a swot, and I approach English work with alacrity and brightness, and it feels good to be on top of everything.
The day continues. At one point I'm walking about the school grounds during lunchtime and, it seems, I'm quite popular. I am surrounded by students in uniform and I'm talking amongst them, and then, when the small crowd has dissipated, a girl in a younger year has soon approached me, and with a request that I help her with a situation in which a friend of hers is being bullied. It's one of those situations in which, in dream, I normally enter into a conflict, with troublemakers and (for want of a better term) more 'evil' types of people.
These evil people appear in my dreams, as I say, as like the theme of a nightmare. These evil people torment me in dream, and I am often drawn into the depths of a crisis, which goes from scene to scene, with me myself completing each task, with a single unfinished thread that leads onto another frightful scene of terrorism.
To revert to the younger girl's request that I help in her bullying situation, somehow or other it does not arise that I am recruited in this endeavour. Yet, the entire themed situation passes in a second and, whether this is because I am not in reality tired enough to transcend the depths of such a vocation, I fail to engage with the task. However, such a task being fully familiar to me, I consider it completed, and I walk back to class.
And I remember that, in those days, pupils had to walk around a one way system through the corridors. And I have entered in the correct entrance, and there are pupils everywhere, and I have made my way back to class. And inside the class I continue with my English work, and although there is a modicum of the resonance of how things were when I was actually a pupil at this school, namely that I was a middling student, and this reflects in my dream's English work, there is a stronger nuance that I have finally sussed out the notion of academic diligence; I am a model pupil - at times even to the degree that Miss Adams is unprepared for me. It is nice being in this class.
Somewhere else, in the depths of sleep, I find myself in and around the Edgware area, walking there with Eugene, with whom I have gone to eat pizza, or some other takeaway food, and there I am, with a box of soup in my hands, following Eugene around as he marches off ahead, on to some unknown destination of his desire. And as we walk, I see some young Muslim men. They are standing near a seat in the middle of the Station driveway, and I place my box down, for one reason or another, then walk away a little way, and come back to the box. I see that, in the seconds it has taken for me to do so, one of the Muslim men has gobbed in my soup.
I can't quite believe that this has taken place, yet I did see it for my very own eyes. Somewhere, I have placed my trust in the Muslim men, and this expectation has been failed - yet I fail to quite believe in it. In any case I take the box and walk away with it, harbouring hopes that the whole incident was merely in my mind. But the Muslim men become thematic within my dream, and there are factions of the group plotted at varying spots in and around the area. In short, in the case of my box of takeaway soup, I have carried it around, and not eaten from it, and finally placed it back down on some seat or other, and fished out the offending pat, in the efforts that this might make the food good again. It doesn't, inevitably, and I have to leave the food.
I walk around Edgware, sometimes in the wake of Eugene's marching, others having broken off to explore whatever car parks or back ends of the shopping mall that I find myself. And I see colours, and I see that I may have some or other issues with Muslim men who, in reality, I have little dealing, and perhaps I do not know them well as I should do.
I suppose this theme, that there are unknown factions of society that I have little dealings with, is prevalent in reality as well. For example, as I sit at the coffee shop and I watch the many people attending to their daily lives, I see and think about how my own relations with the myriad of individuals passes itself on to some or other nuance of how others see and perceive their own relations with others. How, for example, does this person (yes, the bleached haired lady with the large glasses and black jeans) perceive this other person (yes, the small Asian lady waiting at the bus stop with her shopping)? I myself have witnessed the reality of such a triad of consciousness, but how has this effect been witnessed in the eyes of the perceived? Perhaps they were merely unwitting of the instance. For example, I can see across the street the frame of a young barista serving customers at seats outside her place of work; and I can see a couple with a small cockapoo walking toward her, a bit further along the road. What is their experience? I daresay it personally drives me loopy! Is there an experience in which an unwitting human is made aware of a relatively innocuous specimen, and in addition, do they think about the experience? Why does this type of thing cause such interest in me?
Could it be the case, for example, that my own sitting here behind the keyboard, with the various objects of familiarity placed around the desk, is somehow an equivalent experience to those in which an entirely separate human, be they somewhere else entirely, on the other side of the planet, even, is embroiled in those speculations of human interest, and is engaged in entirely other situations, with their own objects of familiarity, or nuances of energetic foreboding, such as... well... anything you could think of? There is a man in India, cooking curried chicken at a restaurant, and he must serve his customers! What does the chicken smell like? What do the customers do for a living? Are they rich? What did they do this morning? What is their experience like?
Harry Kane, the footballer. It is his time. He is England's top boy today. Wherever he may be, be he sleeping now, or sitting at the balcony of his hotel... What is his experience? And I daresay that the existence of Harry Kane is one to which my own paltry existence and experience pales in comparison. That is, Harry Kane is a God! He must be! To have that kind of energy, coupled with the mental tenacity, to keep entire nations engaged not only for the duration of a football game but also for the press conferences and all other media engagements, it is quite astonishing. I am astonished!
But as for Gods, it is one thing that I exist as a meek schizophrenic, and another that it is a truth, that once upon a time it was possible that I could have been so much more. I have complained that medicines, i.e. medication, i.e. sulpiride, piportil, and amisulpiride, are not "God-given". Herein lies the discussion of another nuance of life, which is whether our lives are determined or not, and I hope to discover some better insight into the problem when I have studied Quantum Mechanics later this year. These latter adherents might lay claim to the possibility for there to be the cause to think that what we see as the basis of our lives is not the be all and end all of everything. Our consciousnesses could eventually be strewn across the vast expanses of the universe, and the sum total of everything that can possibly be experienced is more like the reality of our lives. Well, my life in particular is a meagre and meek thing, but that's not for want of something more. Perhaps the reality of life is that... well... God Himself needs a break! There are billions of us - billions of others, as they'd have you think - and some are running about a field, some are making curry, some are writing what is likely to be a lost blog entry, and some... some are in pain. Some are in a great deal of pain and are fearful for their own lives. That, as some would have you believe, is a reality.
Yet, I know what pain is like. I know what discomfort is like. I know what luxury is like. I know what love is like, and I know what morality is. I know many possible examples of what it is to experience humanity. What remains is the problem and problematic conundrum of other human's lives. And not merely human lives, but those of animals, and foliage, and dare I say inanimate matter. Could the experience of everything that harbours the capability of having an experience be bound up in the solitary existence, namely mine, yours, and everything else that exists? And given that the capacity for the billions of sentient beings (orangutans in African jungles, polecats in the Alaskan tundra, bus drivers all over the world) to have their own experiences is real, could such a capacity be found, namely, discovered within the recesses of our own consciousnesses?
This would amount, in short, to a personal investigation. I would personally wish to engender a global engagement with this investigation; that is, it seems a moot point to pursue any claims pertaining to my own experience. That is, I would rather that the entirety of humanity would engage in such an investigation. However, I can say, without qualms and without embarrassment, that my investigation is two-fold.
One: I see nothing whatsoever within the reaches of my own sensibility that tells me there is anything whatsoever to be said for the reality of a breach of consciousness laws, be they naïvely realistic, or otherwise. That is, when I have dreamed, and have dreamed lucidly and deeply, I have had no indication that anything like a tunnelling of my "atomic consciousness", into other consciousnesses, is at all possible. That said, on paper, it seems like a viable theory, and perhaps there is something in it. Perhaps there is a grand unified theory that connects it all. The reality of it would not only be life changing, but would change the world. Yet I suspect that these things are more in the realm of a spattering of individual's interests.
Two: All scientific and quantum mechanical speculations notwithstanding, there is a residual experience which I can lay claim to having, which is neither dream nor reality, yet is altogether cerebral. And I digress:
Do you, like I often do, ever experience that anomaly of perception in which you can spontaneously see a distant spark of light, within the midst of your visual expanse? That is, are you ever disposed (washing dishes, or brushing your teeth, etc) to witness a very strong and very miniscule spot of bright light that appears upon your retina? Said spot, spark, wisp of light, is rarely talked about. It is one of those unconscious features of perception that we forget could be of importance. What could this anomaly represent?
In the one instance, admittedly, perhaps it is a trick of the brain; a mere hallucination.
In a second instance, perhaps it is a hint to something that exists within us all, at a deeper level. I find that when I experience this spark, I am led to recount a previous momentary resonance in which I myself was subconsciously elsewhere. Such a perception, in this case, seems to have awoken me from a subconscious slumber, in a sense to say, "Wake up into your life!" (I find, usually, that such a perception is followed by the same kind of feeling one may have when, having once woken of a morning, trying to recount the previous night's dream, namely, a dull kind of "resistance" or blockage to an open mind, whereas the preceding sensation was one, intuitively, of pure unconscious freedom.)
In a third instance, perhaps such a bright spark of the consciousness is indicative of the possibilities of an eternally light mind. That is, could there ever be such a thing as the experience in which every atom of our consciousness - every morsel of our conscious capabilities - is finally alight with consciousness; on fire from the swathes of pure perception. I like to think the possibility a reality, and its truth would mean that it is now on the sentient being to try to find everything within their being to attain this form of conscious experience.
It's admittedly a bit out there. But it's a nice thought.
So, in summary, dreams never give you access to other people's minds and lives, yet we naively believe in the existence of these other lives, and indeed we attribute quite a lot that we rely on to these minds, and so the possibility of a transition of perceptions is not to be sniffed at, theoretically. Dreams never give you this access, but there are residual, latent experiences which are not mainstream experiences, but which should be brought to light, so to speak, so as to round out the capacities and possibilities of human experiences, and ones which should help shed light on modern enlightenment consciousness.
They had one two hundred years ago, so why not today?
Anyway, with that, I leave it there.
Thank you,
Daniel
