I dreamt of it again, the place where nothing and everything is.
It’s a place where you have all the answers, though they’re never told to you.
It’s not a cold place, but it’s not warm either. It’s sort of nothing. It doesn’t feel like you need to gauge the temperature on your skin, or in your body. That is not to say that you do not need to feel, just that temperature is not important.
When I was there, I was not alone although I was the only one like me there. I didn’t feel like I was meant to be there, but I was welcome. Or more so, my presence didn’t matter nor offend.
There, nothing felt the same, but I couldn’t remember what anything else was supposed to feel like.
When I woke up, I suddenly felt my pillow, my bed, my blanket. I suddenly noticed the smell of the sun on my carpet. I suddenly realized that I could see the light filtering through my window. I suddenly heard the lawnmower. And I suddenly realized that I had not used these senses in quite some time. Of course, I had been sleeping, but I knew that these feelings had not been experienced during my sleep, during my dream.
During my dream, all that I could feel was the slimy moisture of the air, the ground, and them. They were huge and tiny and many sizes in between. The variation made their sizes seemed so absurdly irrelevant. In fact, it felt useless to look at them. If only I could have closed my eyes. My eyes felt like an appendix, there only because I was born with them, not because I needed them.
My ears and nose,
my mouth.
It felt like they were there only to remind me that I was not meant for this place and I wanted so badly to be able to rid myself of them, experience it as it was meant to be.
But now I wonder, is it a place that is meant to be experienced? I’m not sure experienced is the right word. Experienced is our word, our human word. It doesn’t feel adequate to explain what this was like. This was not an experience; it was a being.
I mean to say, I just was. I did not try to understand, in fact, that part of my brain may have been turned off. You see, I did not need to understand because I already knew what I needed to.
When I moved in my dream, in this place, my movements were eternal. Not changing, lasting forever. Filled with truths and questions.
I moved and got to where I needed. I didn’t feel alone in the decision to move. I’m not sure I could even call it a decision. The humanness of the word decision does not feel proper here, in this place.
I yearned to move, and the others beckoned me to them.
When I woke up from my dream, from this place, I suddenly remembered that I had dreamt of this place before. During my sleep, I could not remember. It was as though I had never actually left it. One does not remember that they are in their house while they are in it, it just is that way.
I got to them, or they pulled me to them, or we moved to each other. All of them are true. As we moved, universes of time elapsed, this I knew. Behind them, they left something of themselves, only for the something to disappear.
We touched.
They were sticky and wet. Just like everything else. They felt the same as the air, but more of it.
When we touch something wet, we know it’s wet. It doesn’t have to be cold, or hot, or warm. What is that?
In this place, with them, I knew they were wet without considering it.
When we touched, they made me know everything. I thought I had already known, but it must have been the air – enough something of them for me to think I’d known enough, but not solid enough for it to be fully true.
I cannot think now what it was that I knew in my dream. When I woke up, I knew nothing of the truths I’d known while I was asleep.
As we touched somethings of them left, to touch other things. And I thought of my ineptitude to do the same, to remove parts of myself and send them off, not worrying if they’d return.
I wanted them to absorb me, to make me a part of them, a something of them. For my body to rid itself of all the bits that made it redundant in this place. For myself to become a part of the air that would then become them, and then the air, and then them again, forever. Forever in all the directions that forever can go.
What is a direction if you can go in all of them at once?
When I woke up, I wanted to go back to sleep.