Beneath Shut Eyes

You are walking in the park on a lazy summer evening, feeling a warm breeze roll over your skin like an invisible ocean wave, leaving you damp and just a little salty. You are at the train-station, waiting for a new place and a new time, listening to the whispers of all that you have known but will soon cease to know. You are sitting at a small metal table on the sunlit campus of a nameless university, watching the bubbles of knowledge drift listlessly past you like orbs of shimmering potential. You’re on a high and lonesome skyway, a snake of black asphalt slithering through the clouds, stuck in between lives. You are in a dark, smog shrouded room that you thought you knew, but is suddenly unfamiliar, wallowing in the liquor sweat of misused opportunity. You are on the edge of a dark forest, whose shade is both comforting and terrifying, and you are looking out onto a sun-speckled meadow where small children, who were once you, are playing. You are under water, wrapped in the deep blue of nothingness, and you have forgotten which way is up and which way is down… the light is so distant.

Your eyes are shut. They will remain this way until the dream is over. Beneath the placid surface of your resting face, a hundred clocks are throwing neon sparks into the ceiling of your brain. Time is ticking by, but it doesn’t matter anymore, because where you are there is no such thing as time or death. You are free. FREE. Found Recklessly Entering Eternity.

At first, the only thing that exists is darkness, deep and round and hollow; full of mysteries. When you shout there are no echoes, because there are no walls. Little translucent lights dance and flicker in the corners of your eyes but when you turn to look, they vanish. You can hear many voices mingling with the silence, but you can’t understand what is being said. You forget that you have to breathe, or that you even have lungs. You have no feet, but you feel is a strong sense of movement, like falling horizontal across the sky. Up ahead there is a weak light, like someone ripped a miniscule hole in the fabric of your existence. The marble of illumination seems to grow like a child in its mother’s womb, spreading multi-colored tendrils of lightening across the pitch-black surface of your mind.

Outside, in the shifting air of that other place, you are lying quietly on a bed, like a boat anchored in a still sea, peering down into the world beneath the waves. The only sound is the steady hum of a dying fan, loyally blowing its last breaths across your face. The fan drowns out the oppressive sounds of traffic, flowing like a river of headlights through the night, forever distant yet forever present. The fan does its best to out-speak the real world.

Inside, tucked neatly away in a nest of living wires and organic circuit boards, the machinery is beginning to heat up. Those forgotten lobes begin to send signals through the glossy tubes of your subconscious. Its like turning on a projector screen inside your eyelids. That small sphere of light blossoms into a geometric whirlwind of color. Inside this kaleidoscope you begin to see shapes which melt into faces and ooze into foreign landscapes with buzzing purple trees and crimson skies. You are flying through the air at an incredible speed now. Occasionally you land when you see someplace familiar, you see people you haven’t seen in years, people who are dead back in that old world. You see places from your childhood that you forgot you remembered and relive memories you thought were dreams. But something is always different, some powerful force is always pulling you forward into the abyss; into the next world. Sometimes you don’t even get a chance to say goodbye, you are sucked up into the black air by the vacuum inside your skull and thrown forward into oblivion. Over and over you tumble, like the clothes in a high-powered dryer with no button that says “STOP.” You are free of everything save freedom itself, and this lack of restraint can be terrifying. Demons arise out of the dark corners of your waking thoughts and terrorize you, only to be dissolved by the uninterrupted flow of inner change. You fly through this world for what seems like an eternity, grabbing on to neon lightening bolts. Then suddenly…

You hear a faint noise. It is distant but it is steadily getting louder. You feel the slender fingers of gravity grasping at your temples. The noise keeps getting louder. It sounds almost like… voices. Then it dawns on you; It’s Dudley and Bob’s Morning Show!” Oh jeez, time to get up and go to class. Wah Wahhh.