Lastnight I had a dream. It seemed like another dream about death. It was the same feeling, but this one wasn't violent, nor was there any imagery to suggest death. It just felt like being set free, just like death feels in all of the other dreams.
In the dream, I am observing myself from a perspective of 3 feet away, and facing my other self. I take note of the fact that my other self is bald. Not the type of bald that results when you shave your head, but the kind where the follicles themselves are gone. My other self is old. Not wrinkled at all, just old. It's some nuance of the skin that tips me off about this fact: some textural or tonal quality. Then the left side of my head, the right side from my inverse viewing perspective, unfolds like beautiful origami into planes of pure light, and the planes drop down like the pages of a book.
This was the most peaceful dream I have had on the topic of death. I have dreams about it constantly. It blows me away sometimes, the things that I experience in my dreams. I have always been a vivid dreamer. Sometimes that's a good thing. I feel both pleasure and pain in all of their depth and dimension in my dreams. The fact that I suffer death repeatedly makes this sort of tough. Sometimes I wake up in the morning having died the night before. That's strange to say. It doesn't really help me feel rested.
Growing up, I always heard that if you die in your dreams, you're dead. If that's true, then I died the first time this happened, in 1998. I was a man walking down a dark alley of cobblestones in the early 20th century. It was late at night, and I was alone. I heard a noise. A man ran at me and stabbed me repeatedly in the abdomen. He mugged me. He left me on the puddle covered ground to bleed out. It took a while. The pain was unbelievable. I was face down. I felt something like the light delicate tickle of a feather in my breastplate. This feeling was exiting my body through layers of bone and muscle and skin. When the feeling reached the exterior threshhold of the physical space my body occupied in the world, it didn't hurt anymore, and I was suddenly in a different place.
It was black like black velvet. It was the most saturated black i have ever seen. There was no such thing as time anymore. In the very far distance a warm yellow light shone through the thick black. I was moving toward it. As I neared the light, I understood it better. It was not one light, but hundreds of thousands of individual lights swirling about in the same way that fish do when they are hunted. The lights had no physical matter. I went in. Sometimes I was on the outside, sometimes I was on the inside, or near the top or bottom. Then I had the wind knocked out of me, and was born into the body of a baby and through a vagina.
In another dream, I was a man in an ornate office with a huge mahogany desk. I had a gun sitting on the corner of my desk. I was writing a note, which I placed in the center of the desk when I was finished. I stood up, walked to the middle of the room, and almost in mid-step blew my brains out. I felt the bullet enter my head and, as if in slow-motion, I knew right where it was cutting through my brain. Then I fell forward and never hit the ground. I melted into water, and then breathed it in as efficiently as any aquatic creature.
I don't know what these dreams mean. I'm not sure if they are memories or if they are metaphors.I do know that at 13 years old, when I did heroin, the one and only time I ever did, I felt the same burning trajectory through my head. It was years before I had the dream. It fascinates me, the things that I experience when I am less conscious. And it feels like there's something important there for me. Now if I could just figure out what.
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