Here is a draft copy of the first chapter of the book I am working on. The rest of the book has a surreal, comic tone, so this is an odd way to set it up. Hopefully it will make sense when the final comes out. It could be a short story on its own.
It is still a rough draft which means it could be very different later (or cut entirely for all I know).
Prequel
I have always wondered the same things we all wonder. In my case, I may have wondered too often; distracted and pre-occupied by those really big questions and the answers they don't teach in school. All of my musings and thoughts led to the eternal question; 'Why am I here?' I was equally mesmerized by that eternal question's annoying siblings; “Where am I going?' and 'Where was I before?'
A part of this “wondering” led me to explore the dream-state; the “other” consciousness. From electronic scans of sleeping brains to near-sleeping meditation methods, I was certain that at least some of the answers I sought were to be found in the subconscious and the unconscious. In this searching process, I came upon 'lucid dreaming'; waking and controlling our actions and environments consciously while dreaming
Lucid dreaming blurs the lines of reality. Nearly everyone says that they wish they could fly freely within their dreams. Some say that they do – and they probably have. Flying is but one of the many abilities we may have in such an alternate experience. Although we may all stumble upon these dreams from time to time, few of us ever know what to truly do with the opportunity.
I see lucid dreaming as the type of consciousness we must have had while gestating in the womb. At some point in the process of growing from a zygote to a fetus to a new-born child (and I'm not even going to touch when that is) a light goes on and we are conscious and aware. At that moment we are present in the physical world. As a developing fetus we can react to sounds outside and scratch at our noses. We smile. What are we thinking in those moments?
I am now convinced that we are all born with the capacity to fly or do anything we wish in our dreams, but most of us are also born fearful of our dreams. How sad it is, then, that as we age, we lose our ease of access to that changeable, malleable, plastic world beyond even our own imaginations. I no longer believe it to be a coincidence that - while we are born fearful of our dreams - we lose that access in proportion with our so-called maturity. For most of us, time chases away the monster-filled night-mares and boogie men . If the dreams of our maturity don't lessen in intensity, at the very least we accept most of them without calling for our mommies. Nightmares are dismissed as 'bad dreams' at our wine-tastings, if they are mentioned at all. Except for a gifted few, most of us un-learn the ability to wake within a dream as we mature,.
For six years, I meditated and techniqued each day in my search to reclaim that gift. Naturally, the question arose:
For all the times I had awoken from dreams, could I have simply slipped into one and never returned?
If you have ever had one of these lucid dreams, then you know how so completely, believably real they can be. In a lucid dream, you live, love and feel every nuance that, in our waking life, we take for granted. If anything, you feel more. More thoughts, faster. More feelings, amplified. In comparison, my wakeful consciousness feels like life with the brakes on.
I sometimes wondered if those little details and distinctions are the fingerprints of reality. Can we actually see a stamp of authenticity to the world around us if we look hard enough? Carlos Castaneda was the first to offer me insight on this, and he felt that we can see the world as it actually is and not the illusion we see. Many others before him and since have claimed the same.
Douglas Adams thought about the big questions which he broke down into the big three -'Life', 'The Universe' and 'Everything'. Over the course of five books he chronicled the adventures of his main character who was - somewhat unknowingly – seeking big truths when Adams decided that the answer to life the universe and everything was “42”. Absurd in its simplicity, “42” is an even number which even looks plausible in print. Shrouded in the elegance of such simplicity, Adams was implying that all such questions may be much simpler than we had thought and that we were making much adieu about nothing. I don't think that Adams was mocking those like me who wanted real answers, and so I loved his solution. Seeking such answers is frustrating stuff. How many tmes had I been tempted to just decide that “THE TRUTH” is something which is very hard to find and it may well be impossible to ever know, so we may as well accept this, call the answer anything we wish – even 42 – and just move on with our lives. The relief from such burdens is so very tempting yet it had always felt wrong to give up so easily. Despite his writings, I'd be willing to bet that Adams never – ever - stopped pondering on any of the big three. He would never have written five books on the subject had it not been on his mind much of the time.
It is just not in me to settle for 42, so I googled and read all I could while still working and living.
I had always contemplated the true nature of the natural world, if you'll pardon the pun. Seeing dreams as a separate reality, I had studied general relativity, special relativity; string theory and M theory. Dreams, I was sure, were part of the puzzle that is our universe. Then one night, and I will never forget that night, these heady theories came to life in a way I could have never dreamt.
It was a dream beyond any I had before. It began as many other lucid dreams had. This one was a recurrent vision I was familiar with of a roller-coaster in the middle of blue space. I spent some time talking to the dream-people I dreamt – characters who seemed so truly genuine to me. We stood in the line for the coaster, but I never made it on the ride. I don't remember just how or why, but I do recall that at some point I went from mundane small-talk to finding off on a grand Kafkaesque experience – the end result of which was that I found myself in the hallway of an old hotel. It was a Wild West-style hotel and this hallway was at the top of three flights of stairs which wound up an open-center stairwell. I had never been here before and hadn't thought about such an environment. At a seemingly-random point in my dream I had been pulled from one place and found myself standing in cowboy-land. To my left was a three-story drop. To my right were the evenly spaced hotel doors and an umbrella stand which looked like it had been stolen from the Palace of Versailles and placed there next to Room Seven's door.
To this day I am not certain why I did what I did in that next instant. I can't mean that more. I can't explain why I seemed to instinctively seize the umbrella stand and hold onto it with a strength at the limits of not only my dream muscles, but my will. After only a few seconds in my control, the umbrella stand changed its appearance and it's substance to that which I had inexplicably seen and known it to truly be at my first glimpse of it. It was a “blue”. I had read about these nasty, deadly predators which lie out there where the dreams are. Blues are amorphous blue blobs which disguise themselves within our dreams, but seldom fit the context of the dream. If something from the background of your dream catches your eye because it is brighter or does not fit the story, there is a good chance that it is a blue. There are blues in everyone's dreams, but they present little danger to those oblivious to them. When encountered and recognized though, the dreamer is meeting the blue on his level and that makes the dream-creature very uncomfortable. Nefarious, deceptive and ill-tempered, Blues feel they must always be camoflaged.
I had recognized many disguised blues before, but never had I considered attacking one. I had only recently become proficient in deliberately “seeing” them in their true form and not as whatever they were pretending to be. I was pushing one of the final veils aside; peeking behind the curtains of my dreams I was beyond my abilities, boldly - ignorantly - making a mistake which nearly cost me my life. This blue wriggled and wretched in its attempt to escape my bear hug, using each moment to drain me of my energy – quite literally, the energy of my life. We are all just energy, and in our dreams the line between our body form and our pure energy form is drawn in watercolors rather than oils. Blues can take our energy from us and this is what makes them lethal. I knew from all that I had read that I was being tested – by whom I can't yet say – and this test was very, very real. If I had let go, I knew, I would never wake. The papers would read that I 'died from natural causes' while I slept. The truth would be that I was drained of my life while dreaming.
If I could not squeeze him from my dream soon, he would drain me completely. I held tightly as I willed my will over his. Once you begin wrestling with a blue, you must simply outlast it. I was stealing from him as he stole from me. I knew that my resources had to outlast his and struggled to squeeze his life from him just a little more rapidly. At the defining moment, I could feel him succumb but I was only seconds from losing the battle myself. I persisted in squeezing nothingness long after the blue had simply dissolved to nothingness. After what seemed like (and may have been) an eternity, there was an instantaneous release. From squeezing blue goo for my life, I suddenly was sitting bolt upright in my bed, struggling for air. The hotel was gone and I was now in my bed. Back safely awake, I gathered myself and simply stared at my blanketed feet. Only when I looked at my sleeping girlfriend did I begin to realize that I was not awake at all. She was hideous and in no way was she the girl I loved. I screamed out my primal scream and denied that this was at all what I believed to be real with my soul. Somewhere in that scream, the illusion of that world disappeared and I sat bolt upright once again, just as before, in my room.
Waking for the second time in thirty seconds I was suspicious now. I checked my girlfriend at once and saw that it was her lovely, smiling, sleeping face nested into her pillow as I had always known. My heart and my jaw relaxed in unison at this. With no idea of what to expect in this game, I checked for anything out of place. Anything. As I'm sure you know already, something was not right and at last I found the incongruity. Rather than displaying any sort of time on its bright red digits, the alarm clock simply indicated, “AWAY”. With this recognition, I flashed away from this false bedroom and another false girlfriend. Once again, I sat bolt upright in my bed.
It didn't take long to see that this time there was an umbrella stand at the foot of the bed. I sat bolt upright yet again.
I was now genuinely afraid that I would never awake to my own reality again. If I was fooled well enough and accepted what I saw as fact, I could be marooned in a false, but very real existence. At first, all seemed at peace and my dream almost got me this time. It took me so long to find the difference that I was beginning to believe I was safe. The bedspread was wrong. The bedspread was, in every detail, an actual bedspread I owned, but not the one I had gone to sleep beneath that night. I knew that this spread was folded neatly in the closet in my reality. The bed cover I saw here was a lighter, summer covering. In the midst of winter, it should have been the overstuffed chocolate-brown blanket I had used for many years. Once recognized, I sat bolt upright yet again. I looked for some clue for what seemed like hours. Nervously, I scanned the room – examining every identifiable feature and comparing them with my memory. I was too weak to get out of bed. I only decided to wake my sleeping beauty when I was reasonably sure that I was truly awake and “home”. Even then, with all sense of where I might actually be harshly torn into strips like a seventh grader's papier macher project, I feared what I may be waking.
Slowly, reluctantly I tapped her shoulder lightly with my fingertip. She did not wake at first, so I proceeded to run my fingers through her hair and massage her scalp. As she stirred, I started to incoherently tell her how I had awakened four times to false rooms. How I felt inexplicably drained of all my energy. How it was all that I could do to muster the energy to tell her this. How scared I had been.
I did not get out of bed the next day at all. Life has a feeling. Living is a vibration. I never really understood that until all but the very last of it had been drained from me. I felt almost nothing. I sensed the lack of life's vibrations which I had never noticed until they were no longer there. I was gaunt and felt near death beyond any figurative speech. To open my eyes took concentration and the spending of precious life-force. I would not allow myself to sleep, but I did rest. On the second day I visited the bathroom with great difficulty and went immediately back to bed. On the third day, I ate.
I passed the time wondering about my encounter and questioning whether or not I had passed the test. If I had passed it, what was the test measuring? Was it the test I had read about, or was I simply being taught a lesson. Most of all I wondered who was testing me or teaching this lesson.
That night shattered what I thought I knew and showed me just how little I actually could conceive. No mere dream can drain the essence of my life from me, yet this is what happened so I can only believe that it was not merely a dream at all, but more of a wandering, hapless excursion into the realm where dreams exist and I did not belong. I was not sick with flu. I had not been simply tired to the point of exhaustion by the activities of the previous day. To move an arm was something I would rest an hour to do. I had no doubts about what had happened. Even today, I am still looking for the discrepancy. Am I really here? If so, where is that, really?
I know how this all must sound to you. I get it. I can see your eyes rolling and that's fine. Whatever you might think, it doesn't change the fact that it is true. The truth, you see, doesn't care what you or I think, feel or believe. The facts continue to be despite our crazy ideas. I learned more about the nature of our existence in that one night than I...you get the point. There are stars-in-the-sky numbers of places we can go through the use of the portal we call dreams. If I can tell you nothing else in this life, I hope you will hear me when I say that there is more to our lives than what we see in our waking hours. It is just as real and far more complex. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I'm looking – and I'm finding a few.
Anyway, I didn't mean to go on about it like this, it's just that I think I had another one of those dreams last night.
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