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Into the Mind

This was a dream that stood up on it’s own.  Like something out of someone’s life that wasn’t mine.  It must have been someone else, but It is harder and harder to tell the difference.  I saw it all so clearly, so perfect.  I almost felt the emotions, but there was this wall of glass between what was happening and what I was feeling.  Like looking in on something in a fishtank.  Swimming and living, and distinct.  I remember the feelings though, and the smell.  Like a list of characters, and words.  Symbols of what I was seeing and what was attached to each event.

I have to remember this, and start to put it into some form that stays in my mind.  Things seem to slip away sometimes, and they should be there, but they aren’t.  I know that I need to remember this, but at the same time if it fades like the other memories, i feel like i will still have it with me.  It needs to remain, it has to feel burnt into place.

I remember the feeling of the birth, the body and the pain.  I remember the feelings of my stomach pulling itself inward.  Pain was so sharp, but after so long, it was like the pain was who i was.  I couldn’t remember a time when i didn’t hurt, and it was now just a core part of me.  I remember also this sense of peace.  Like this was right and this was human.  Something that was beyond my understanding and also so pure that it didn’t even need to be understood.

I remember the feeling that somehow I was a string, and i was in the process of tying another piece of string to mine.  Like I needed to badly tie a knot between us, and let this string start to unwind from me.  But at the same time, it was connected to me.  It threw my mind back, and I realized that I was connected to a thread, and so was that thread.  We were the warp, the woof was everyone passing along the thread to hold it in place.  The warp was unending and timeless.

But then the pain, the feeling of being too tight.  My whole body felt too tight.  Like the skin couldn’t hold what I was doing in any longer.  Something was bursting out, and needing to be freed or I would rip apart.  Come apart at the seams and fall to pieces.  This feeling was something so new, and so primal.  I couldn’t tell you how long each burst last.  It seemed timeless and too short at the same moment.  Something so much a part of me that I knew i couldn’t forget.  At the same time though I knew that my brain was washing itself in a way to make this pain fall away.  Something to keep the moment at bay.

My son was being born.  I remember that moment.  The moment it came back to me what was happening.  What was being done.  What was going on, and what it meant for me and every thread going back down the line above me.  Every line that would be held in place by his.  Something was happening, and I could feel it so clearly.

This memory seems so real.  I just need a moment to think, a moment to reflect.  Maybe if I close my eyes for a minute, the details will be clear.  The moment will seem real, or i will know if that was me.  Did I have this memory?

by ·Comments Off on Tin and the hallowed ground

It is here again.  I heard it.  Farther away this time.  Down the hall?  Why do i feel like the sound is in a hallway.  I was laying here on my back.  Always on my back.  I heard a knock.  Again a single knock.  It echoed down a long room, or a hallway of some kind.  The sound was bouncing in the quiet, and something like that seems so much deeper and significant when it is the only sound you hear.  I remember exactly what i was doing.  Normally this would have taken all my concentration.

I was noticing my fingers.  I could feel the edge of a nail catching on the sheets over my hands.  I had never noticed something like this before.  It seemed rough, like a nail was cut wrong, and the edge was sharp.  This gentle tugging of fabric against my nail.  Just enough of an annoyance that I can’t get it out of my mind.  Like a tiny splinter in your finger that keeps snagging against your pocket.  But this one was in my nail.  The thing that I can’t figure out is how the pressure against the sheets changed if my hands never move.  Did my hand move while i slept?  And how did my nail get a rough edge.  Were did that come from?  How did it get cut.

Then that knock.  That sound.  It sounded like a hand on wood, but my door doesn’t look like wood.  Are there more doors of materials that are different than mine.  Maybe mine is wood too and I just am not seeing it correctly.  It would be so much easier if i could stand and open the door.  See what lies beyond this place, see what is in the hallway at least.  See something beyond the walls and the ceiling.  To escape dreaming for a moment of movement and freedom.  Can a sound really die down.  Is the sound moved from the source into the objects it touches.  Slight vibrations shifting the outer layers of atoms, moving them slightly faster as they absorb the kinetic energy of the sound.

If the atoms of my walls speed up enough, maybe they will shatter away, or slowly dissolve into gas, or vibrate into nothingness.  I don’t know what would happen.  How many knocks would that take, how many hands on doors would it take till the walls themselves have enough energy to open up.

That nail though.  Is that something i can keep track of.  If i remember it today, but after waking don’t feel the pull of the sheet, does that mean my hand moved?  Does that mean someone moved the sheet?  Cleaned and trimmed my nails?  Removed the nails all together.  Would it be a sign that I am changing in this place, or that the place around me is changing and I can change with it.  The nail might be everything I need to change where I am, or at least move my hands.  I know that or the nail will pick at me, and i will feel the sheet pulling against me forever.

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I dreamt of life and smells last night.  So many smells mixed together, but the one that stood out more than anything was the smell of wet earth and life.  It smelled like freshly tilled soil.  Something that is as much a part of the plant as the sun and the wind.  It was almost crawling with life.  But at the same time, it was sleeping.

My dreams seem to be streching out more and more.  The time frames of them are beyond what I remember from before.  From before I was here. I still think these are someone else’s dreams that have made their way into my mind.  I keep having flashes that my mind is this bank.  Not a bank of money or of a river, but something hard and unyeilding.  I know it is so hard to think of terms that pull in what it seems like.  Why can’t I remember what I look like anymore?

I know that something is present in these moments when i dream, some fragment of a memory.  Some bit of me is in these moments, but they always cut away before I can see myself.  When i try to catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror or a reflective surface, i see light.  Only a blurred light, and I don’t understand why.  How long has it been since I have seen my face.  Why don’t I remember what I look like?  What if i have seen reflections in the distance, but couldn’t tell it was me i was seeing.

The dream though.  The earth, the feeling of the soil, the sensation of my hands in the ground.  I can feel my hands plunging into it.  Reaching into the ground and the earth surrounding them.  It was cool, and warm at the same time.  Soothing, and rough.  And the smell that rose from the ground was something I can’t describe.  I read once that the smell is a bacteria.  That when it is disturbed it releases a chemical signal.  A warning alarm of some sort.  I can’t remember if that is true, or another dream.  Is that smell that comforts me so much a scream of the dirt.  It can’t be that our brains are tied into that smell so closely.  I still wonder if I was a farmer.  What did i do when i wasn’t here?  When i wasn’t dreaming all the time.  Dreaming in this room and this bed.  Stuck in this body.  I can’t have been a farmer could i?  I must have done something, but I can’t remember any of it.  I know i had a job to do, and work that was mine, but it isn’t something I dream about.  I can’t remember what it was anymore.  I can’t remember so much of what was happening before I got here.

Today was disjointed.  All the thoughts I had are tumbling around, working their way through my brain.  Like a scramble of thoughts, where each one is there as a picture or a thumbnail of the underlying idea.  Nothing major or themed in any way comes through, but each is trying to get free at the same moment.

by ·Comments Off on Far over, all things cold.

I was so cold last night.  Beyond what I think cold can be.  A frozen feeling so deep, i could feel my marrow turn to crystal.  Some lattice formed in my veins, and moved through my blood.  a form of ice that moved into all parts of me.  I don’t know how to describe the feeling.  Knowing that each cell the lattice touched was a part of a chain, linking from cell to cell.  Everything becoming frozen.  What does that mean in a dream.  I know what the feeling of the crystal was.  What the feeling of resonance was, and in each cell the slow thrum.  Thrum is the word that comes to mind but it isn’t right.  It was something between a wave of a thrumming string, and a whirling motion of a whirlpool.

It started enough like everything else to seem so normal.  Normal i guess must be relative to me, since as long as i can remember I have been here in this room and this bed.  For me though, it started as most of my dreams do.  Just things happening like watching a movie.  Knowing that you are in a movie, but not able to stop the frames, or move the point of view.  Then something reached out from the dream and touched my hand.  Right behind the middle knuckle of my right hand.  That is when it happened.  The point of contact, i could feel it down to the atom.  The movement was like two spinning spheres going in opposite directions coming in contact.  The speed was the same, and they seemed to cancel themselves out.  It felt like a bike wheel stopping in space, and all the momentum moving back to the frame and throwing me forward.  Every bit of the energy from that stopped the next cell.

I remember gasping, pulling my breath in like it was the last thing that I would ever do.  Knowing that this can’t be happening.  Feeling this frozen cold spreading like sparks of electricity up from my hand.  I remember I looked down at my hand, and didn’t know what it was.  Looking at it, i could almost see the change happening.  Knowing that the spread was starting.  I could feel each piece of matter stop.  It felt like a clockwork gear that was only held together by the force of motion.  Then, the smallest gear stopped moving and fell out of place.  The next stopped because the first wasn’t there to push it.  It felt like a cascade of pieces moving out of place.

I felt this unknowing terror at this, and remember my left hand grabbing my right wrist and knowing that this was pointless.  Like a person bitten by a snake as they reached under a log.  You pull back and grab your hand, but there isn’t a way to stop what has started.  The poison was inside of me then, and would follow it’s course.  The body wasn’t meant to have parts stop.  The system had no way to deal with this, or a way to partition the frozen portions before the hazard spread and moved beyond the point of collision.  I can’t even remember who touched my hand, or what they were doing in my dreams.  Everything focused on the point and the feeling of danger.  Now I am awake again, and can’t look down to see what my body is doing.

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This is a new day i think.  Or a new week if i am sleeping more than I should again.  I can’t remember, and there isn’t a way to tell.  I have become obsessed with the doorknob.  Not obsessed in a bad way.  Not like the doorknob had much to fear if i can’t get out of this bed it seems.  I am just confused by the shape of it.  For some reason I feel like i am in a medical setting.  Not really a hospital, but someplace with no germs.  Where viruses are stopped by gates in the pathways in.  Walls and filters, and doorways.  Maybe something with the pressure, higher inside than out to push the air out of the building.  Regardless, it is seems to me medical.  I don’t know though, if that is the case, shouldn’t i have seen a nurse?  Or a doctor?  Shouldn’t something in the room have shifted?

The knob, I almost forgot.  I thought most knobs in medical centers were the kind that were the long metal handle, so that it can be shoved down with your elbow or even your back without contaminating your hands.  This one seems like a normal house door.  Like a door that would lead to your bedroom, but fancier than most i have seen.  Like it looks like bronze, that sheen, but the patina of it as well.  I don’t know why i know what the patina of bronze looks like, why would that be something i have learned?  But i noticed that the door has a key hole below the knob.

Do you remember the old knobs on doors, do you remember skeleton keys?  No one does really remember them, but they pop into our minds when we think of keys.  What was the reason for that image to be stuck in my head.  I can see the round top of the hole, and the wide 35 degree arc of space below it where the teeth fit.  So many memories of cabin doors and old key chains.  So many things associated with that shape.  It makes me sad for some reason.  To know that our world has gone to a place where we have teeth on teeth on teeth in our keys now.  Each one an arms race against thieves.  Or is it a way to make use feel secure with our lock.  I guess it isn’t important overall, but it makes me wonder about this place.

How old does the room seem?  How dusty do the walls seem?  The door seems old, the lock seems out of date, and not really something meant to keep anyone inside.  But also, i know the room itself is part of something larger.  Something beyond the space i am in.  Are the sheets the lock?  Maybe the fact that I love being asleep more than awake.  Or i can’t seem to find a handle on how time works here.  All of those?  Maybe just a little of everything.  I wonder what happens when these thoughts stop.  What are the next steps of the thought itself.

by ·Comments Off on Blue and green

I dreamed of blue and green.  It wasn’t water and it wasn’t air.  It was some sort of memory of both.  It was tranquil and still and at the same time full of motion.  I felt like i was in a pipe or a tube of light.  It was fluid and motion and stillness and access to all things.  I felt like there was something that was being spent and sent through the colors and the motion.  I think it was being sent through me.  Was i the medium.  What was the fluid.  Was it fluid?

The blue was the lightest, like a sky covered in clouds, somehow so blue, but still white.  Or robin’s eggs.  How do I remember what robins eggs look like.  Tiny, fragile blue eggs.  I remember them so well, but I can’t remember where I saw them before.  I don’t have a window, and I still don’t remember walking outside or seeing the sky.  And the green was like jade, or leaves with the sun shining through them.  More washed out than that.  It was amazing to see the colors both mix together, but so defined.  I could see the flows past each other.  Moving, and still, and together, yet defined.  I seemed to be moving on those pathways.  Both out and back, up and down.  I was everywhere in the colors, but also distinct.  Like I was having an out of body experience.

I need to check my body.  It seems like it has been months since I have paid it any mind at all.  How long can a body go without food?  I seem to remember a month, but only three days for one without water.  I don’t remember water either.  Even though it is on my mind so much.  If i can’t go a month without food, how am i still here?  How has nothing happened to me yet when so much time has gone by and nothing has changed in this room.  How much time has gone by?  Do i know what the frame of time is here.  Maybe it hasn’t been as long as I suppose it to be.

I find myself getting distracted by the colors.  It almost seems like maybe this is where my dreams are coming from.  Like I am plucking a strand of color out of the wash of light and reading it into existence.  Like a book where the words are colors and the language is the gradation of spectrum i can’t understand.  Like there are words coming into the patterns, and by existing here, i pull colors into the world and make them into some sort of memory.  I don’t know why this is popping into my mind.  What would dreams have to do with colors, and why am i floating in so many colors.

Back to my body for a moment, the sheet is still here, the bed is still here, I am still here.  I haven’t moved.  I haven’t heard the knock again.  I listened for so many days.  I strained and focused and waited. Nothing yet.  I still can’t see anything outside of my room.  I still can’t seem to move. I can’t feel my body moving even though I can’t stop myself from asking it too.

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It’s all faded now.  Everything that seemed so sharp and clear.  Everything that seemed so real and true, and now I can’t remember anything.  I know that the dreams happened, and i remember the feeling of being there and being asleep and then awake.  Now though, there isn’t anything left that I can see or hear.

That noise, the knock.  I haven’t heard anything at all again.  Have you ever strained and listened for some sound, and every moment you aren’t focused on listening, it seems like you might miss it.  I was afraid to even try to move.  I can’t even remember when i last moved, but then every night when i’m sleeping I dream of so much movement.  Everything in my dreams are these snippets of movement.  Broken into pieces though, and scattered around.  Like someone has taking tiny pieces of home movies, and threw them into my brain.  I am having trouble lately knowing if I am out there or in here.

I saw something last night that made me pause.  I was in the middle of moving and running and I saw someone in a park.  They had something with them, and I know i should know what it was, what i was looking at, but there was something wrong.  I saw them sitting on a bench.  They just looked like a normal person, a man in a sweatshirt.  I don’t remember it being cold, but it must have been fall.  He was looking at something sitting on the bench beside him.  He had a bag, like a messanger bag, but larger.  Resting on the bag, was this thing.  He was staring at it, and reaching towards it.  The thing is, that I couldn’t see what it was.  It was like a cutout of the dream, a missing place, where something should be.  The more i stared, the odder it felt that I couldn’t see the thing that he was looking at.  Knowing that something so normal, and unimportant was blocked out.

The thing that scared me and drew me away from my memories, was that not only was the object missing, but it also seemed to glow.  How can something be black and void, but also give off light at the same time.  It seemed to pulse with light, white, and blue.  Like the light from an arc welder who forgot to cover the exposure.  Blinding, but clean and pure.  I don’t know how to put words onto the feeling.  Like seeing a blank space while out walking.  I remember everything in the dream slowing, almost crawling, as I tried to hold onto this object.  I discovered something else about these dreams, they won’t be held back.

I didn’t understand what it was, and then a feeling like being pushed from behind.  Like a strong wind that wouldn’t be resisted came up, and moved me forward.  I had always thought that these were my dreams.  That i was remembering something that had happened to me.  It always seemed so real and true.  This felt like a movie that someone else was watching.  Something that I was not able to stop.  Everything after that point seems so pale and washed out.  There wasn’t anything else that I remember, and can’t seem to forget that one moment.  And why was I not able to move myself in my own dream.

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How can something so real and sharp in my mind fade away so quickly.  I remember the dreams edges, the corners and sharp moments stand out still.  I remember a building, like an abandoned restaurant, or a food hall.  Chairs and chairs stacked against the wall.  The place looked like it was brand new, and abandoned forever.  It had tables around the center of the large open room, and non of them had any signs of being used.  They were so old though, and worn looking, but not worn from use.  The building seemed like it was slumping over, and yet, it didn’t look like anything was out of place.  It didn’t visibly slump.  It only looked like it had given up, and was almost sloped downward.

The people, i can’t remember them.  I know there were people there, shapes or fabric.  Forms moving.  At the time i thought they were deamons, or some sort of creation of fire and smoke.  Now though I can’t remember at all what they were.  What they looked like, or sounded like.  I remember the smell though.  Funny that would linger in my mind when so much faded away so quickly.  It reminded me of dry books, the paper smell of a bookstore, but not a good bookstore where the paper is moved, and the books are loved and used.  This reminded me of a place where books were heaped up and left to dry rot away.  But the smell was also too hot.  Hot in a way that didn’t make sense.  Like the books were about to catch fire.  Something like that and dust.  Dust and heat.

So how exactly can this be, where i see something that is so real one moment, and fades away into the distance the next.  It doesn’t make any sense to me.  I know it means something.  I can’t remember the holes, even though they seemed so critical at the time.  When i woke up, i could see the holes, and the deep dark, and the fire.  Now i can’t remember if they were really there.  If i remembered them, and then forgot them, do i still remember them?  Or were they never there to remember in the first place.

I guess all of this is just a way to distract myself that the knock never happened again.  One single human sound is so much more painful than silence.  It means maybe someone is here?  Outside these walls, away from my bed.  Out in the world beyond here that I can’t seem to see or gain any access to.  Why one knock?  What were they signalling.  Why didn’t i hear anything other than that single noise, and then where did it go from there.  How long have I been listening as hard as i have.  How long have i laid here waiting for the sound to repeat.  It makes me think of a rabbit in the woods, frozen in place when it hears a crack of a breaking branch.  Straining to hear something, anything, that will let it know what is coming.  The odd thing is though that I don’t feel any fear.  No fear of the sound, or whatever made it.  Just wonder and curiosity.  I just need to see what it was and where it came from.  Something to break up the dreaming.

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Shhhhh…. did i hear that?  I think i heard something.  It sounded like something i think.  I swear the sound was a knock.  Like a single knock on a door.  Like someone was asking or announcing themselves to a room they were getting ready to come into.  Like a Dr, getting ready to come in to see a patient.  Maybe a parent coming into a child’s room and letting them know as a courtesy.  Did i really hear that?

It happened so fast that I wasn’t sure.  It is the first sound I have heard in this place, and the first sound that didn’t seem to come from inside myself, or from the room itself.  Something, outside.  That is such a weird thing that I think sounds from outside are not normal.  Isn’t there a world out there?  Where are my thoughts and memories from if not outside.  Why is this so startling.  Like when you are in an empty house and hear the floorboards creak in a way they only do when someone walks on them, but no one is home but you.  It was that kind of sound.  A lonely sound in a quiet place.  But also, not lonely.  Its was a knock of authority.  Someone who wasn’t waiting for a response. Or someone who didn’t think one was coming.  Someone who was doing it as a courtesy that they didn’t really need to make, but did almost out of habit or routine.  I didn’t move, but my whole body felt like it constricted and got taller.  Can you move without movement?  Is this what animals feel when they feel eyes upon them in the woods?  Something that is seeing me, but i don’t know what it is.

I also keep thinking that the form of this thought, of the way that I am sharing this isn’t structured the way it should be.  I seem to remember seeing how others share thoughts, how they put their structure together, and it seems to be that the form is much more concise and structured.  Like everything is run by an editor and someone makes the form of the words and the intent of the thoughts more cohesive.  I don’t know why, but the way i am thinking makes sense to me, and I don’t want to change it.  At the same time, I want anyone who is trying to see what i am saying, and know the things that I am seeing and thinking and remembering, sees them the right way as well.  In my mind, my thoughts are a runon sentence.  Just a large wall of busy thoughts.  Visual ideas and stories pressed together.

This knock was everything new in the world today.  It shook free a dream.  I have so many dreams of water and woods.  I have dreams of plants, and so many dreams of trees.  Nothing dark or in any color but greens, browns, blues.  Colors of nature of a sort.  Life and growth.  Calm and movement.  But the knock.  That sound shook something loose.  A dream I had last night.  Different from everything I have dreamed before.  But also so familiar, i must have been there before.  If not in life then when sleeping.  The dream.  I don’t know how to put what it is into words.  It was dreams of building, of harsh lines and putting pieces together.  It was a dream of deep holes.  Fire and red heat.  It was a dream of fighting off demons and spirits that only wanted to escape.  Buildings that were abandoned and lost in places, but found and repopulated.  I need to share this, but can’t think of how to do so.

I need to go for now to listen again to see if i hear the knock again.

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This morning i woke up and remembered dreams of pilings.  Dreams of thick dark wood soaked in creosote and oil.  Whole tree trunks, just sunk into the water.  Green water streaming around the pilings and sunlight flashing through the water.  I saw so much in the water that day.  In my eyes i was above the water looking down, and In the water looking up.  From above i saw the shafts of light flowing through the water, i could see the edges of the light and the  ripples in the water.  It almost seemed like you could cut a section of water directly.  Even though it seemed so clear where the water cut into the light, the edges got darker the farther away i looked, and I could almost make out shapes in the distance.  The water moved and flowed and was alive at the same time.

From below I saw so much more.  The thing that stood out to me the most was that I could see the swimming shapes in the water.  I saw shadows of fish floating and washing through the edges of the light.  Smaller shapes of dust glowing as it drifted into and out of the beams.  I remember being mystified about how the shapes seemed to loom so large and so small at the same time.  How they almost seemed to grow as they approached.  The distance seemed to almost be as fluid as the fish themselves.  I couldn’t tell how large or small they were, but i was there with them and they were around me on all sides.  I felt both a sense of fear, and a sense of deep peace.  I knew that nothing there would approach me, or hurt me.  I also knew that I wasn’t anywhere that I was born into, that I was a visitor in this world.  Somewhere that the space of time never wanted me to go.

I remember the most vivid image that still stays with me.  The water was dark, but still visible.  The light was dim, but even on all sides.  In the shape that i could see, dark fins and shapes like tear drops and glass, with tight fins on the top and bottom, and tails behind.  They looked like curved glass and vases.  But alive and moving.  I remember 4 shapes in front of me, moving with the water, but at the same time static.  They were working in the three dimensions of the water, and floating stationary where i could see them.  I felt a sense of peace wash over me.  I can see them now when i close my eyes.  And the same sense of peace and stillness fills my mind.  I see and feel warmth.

All things in this dreams seem so familiar.  I know i have stood here, looking down into the water and seeing these shapes.  I can’t imagine that I have made these thoughts up.  But no matter how vivid my memories are and how deep i dream, how far i go into the thoughts i have I am still hear.  I know that I haven’t moved an inch.  How long have I been here?  How many dreams have I had, how many have i forgotten to stay and remember.  I will dream more and find my way to move.