Staring up, holding a conversation with a light fixture. Sharing your thoughts while it lets you read it. How the light from the windows nearby casts perfect shadows, completely opposite the highlighted arcs. Thinking, not thinking at all, just looking for insight. The moment when you feel yourself go. On the edge of consciousness and sleep. Unable to tell when it will set in. you continue to keep focus, maintain eye contact. Then your focus dims. You start blinking more than usual. Your mind wanders because you let it, you know you couldn’t leash it if you wanted. You are past that point now, drifting. Supremely ephemeral, all surrounding events. Only you, and your thoughts—thoughts about nothing, about you thinking about thinking, about conversations of you explaining yourself and what you are trying to do here to people who very well will never come by or ask such things; but you digress, and speculate, creating a dream reality of all the possible scenarios that can fit into your brief schedule. And suddenly those thoughts aren’t thoughts anymore. For they aren’t controlled by a thinker—they hold the power. What once was your seed, your brain-child is now the puppeteer, allowing you to go on believing that your thoughts are still your own. Your eyes get heavier, blood slowly fills your head, as it lies flat and un-elevated on a communal couch. One second—or so you estimate, because time is irrelevant and undeterminable when left to the solitude of one’s own psyche, regardless of how tranquil this place actually fares in comparison to the often immeasurably hectic life of social reality. For so often the mind is a more chaotic place, largely more bustling with overlapping paths of individual identities. So then, here you are, for I once was. Lying down, staring up. Feeling yourself fall asleep, not knowing when it happen, only that it is inevitable. Several times you catch yourself, opening your eyes wider to make sure that the image—which by now has burned itself into your brain is really the light that you see and not a memory—for when you no longer see it, but picture it, you are gone. Your eyes are shut and dark. Your mind has wandered too far. But you haven’t reached that point yet, you’re still lying there snapping yourself back every chance your get. You try to resist it. So that you will know when it actually come about. You want to catch it in the act, but for that to happen, you must be vigilant, and awake. And there it goes again, some distant part of your brain triggers a thought, one you did not initiate. And this thought is the start of a dream. Not quite but similar. It happened, your eyes clouded over and you transition from thinking about thinking and seeing a light housing on the ceiling to thinking you see the same light—a trick of misdirection—and seeing your thoughts as actions ever so seamlessly. Eyes closed, head slightly throbbing from your general choice of positions to begin this session, and your mind is gone.
Until a noise, a door slam, footsteps, any sound—and not one you might expect—snaps you back and you’re awake; lost with no memory of how you drifted off and how your wandered so aimlessly astray. Because now you see the light again, still dark, because no one feared to walk past and turn the switch on as you lie there staring at the ceiling. And you wonder, how it happened, and how you could have thought that first stray thought that triggered this event. But you can’t. memories are unreliable. Especially when you are on the verge of sleep. So you say to yourself that you will replicate the entire scenario, start from scratch and be more aware this time. But you can’t. you are too awake now. That brief sleep, probably no more than a few seconds, set you into a relaxed state. Rejuvenated and refreshed when your finally snapped back. It’s over, a lost opportunity, blown because you spent it napping in a state of subconscious. And now you have a headache, from all the blood slowly accumulating in your skull. Fitting, because as you look out the window you see a grey sky and a grayer world.
