The Dome

We were all raised in whatever ways, to trust the knowledge of the dying and the dead. I found myself thinking this, repeating it in my head. I understand our suffering, I know the answers, but they fade when I try to speak them, and dissolve back into thought. I turn around and see myself, then I turn around and see myself.

 

Staring at my surroundings, they feel as familiar as a dream I have dreamed before, yet somehow fresh. I am experiencing reality, I am receiving new sensory information. And yet.

The ice that has formed in my mustache is melting. Quickly, the freed water molecules rush in, filling the cracks the sun had burned into my lips. I remember the corpse of a boat, and the rubber siding of a raft, and a helicopter above me.

 

I feel the process beginning, I've had it since I was young. Time winds down and my heart beats like a war drum, and then I have no heart, no breath, no connection to anything, yet I am everything. But then nothing happens, I haven't stopped breathing, my heart is still ticking. I am fear and panic. I remember thrashing in the water in the same way, trying so hard to get out that I had ruined the muscles in my legs for days.

I remember rising into the air, high above the ocean. From there I could see it. The Great Gyre had touched down. Within it stood two lesser gyres, the first upright and the second overlayed the first on its head. At their heart was made a swirling diamond. The clouds broke around it and we rose ever higher. Its sight too awesome, I closed my eyes and my head touched the cold metal floor. The walls burst to life, covered in great electrical vascular systems that flowed from me. I took communion with the beings that met me there. I don't know how I did, maybe its just because I didn't try to run away. I couldn't run away, but if I could, I wouldn't have. Deep down in my heart, I would leave everything to follow this path.

 

If I had been saved then I don't know what this room is now, or if it is even a room. The ocean no longer sits below me, and my deepest gut instinct tells me I have left the universe I know entirely. How does my body know that before I do? And how did we both end up in the same place? The shape of this room suggests it to be a partition of something larger. All the matter, including the air, is animated, like how science told me things looked close up: little bits of stuff spinning and crashing into itself and yet, it still created expressions I understood, like this partition.

 

I was so overwhelmed, I wanted to sleep, to close my eyes and sink into blissful oblivion. Closing my eyes did nothing, in fact, it intensified the characteristic of this sea of undulating chaotic matter. I kept thinking how impossible it was that matter behaving in this way could ever be something. Even in all this I manged to look down at my watch. The second hand ticking away. Though I had already suspected, "Goddamn it," I thought, "this isn't a dream."

one month later...

Man, so much shit has been happening that I've been meaning to write about. Before I can resolve the thought something new comes along that demands my attention. My suspected undiagnosed ADD doesn't help. Probably.

There is something about the nature of reality that keeps me from getting to where I want to be. Its that this quality has been on the tip of my tongue for about seven years now. Some times when I am dreaming I understand it. Or rather I am part of it and there is no need to understand it. But I can never bring it back through. So much of what I try to create stems from this place. Just like how its hard to continue a conversation when you can't remember the name of that one actor, its hard for me to live in reality when I can't remember this one thing about it.

There are other things, peculiarities. There is an image I can picture in my mind's eye. I don't know what it is, it is kind of a shape, but it can be many different shapes and still be specifically that same one shape. When I am able to hone in on it I notice everything fits into it. Past memories, the birthmark on my knee, whatever it is I am looking at, even this right now. It has all of the colors, but it is also only orange and blue. It has familiar qualities, but I don't understand what it is at all. Like experiencing some future technology. What it would be like for an ancient Sumerian to experience an iPhone.

Still, there are other things like how we treat each other, and how we treat what exists around us. I can feel that they are related. Its hard to create when everything I make falls miles short of expressing this thing that feels so important, that feels like it will direct us to be better to each other and this amazing reality that is impossible not to experience. But that feels so idealistic and hoaky, and I know we all know that we could be running shit a million times better than we are