You know how when you’re dreaming, you can do reality checks to start lucid dreaming?
What are the reality checks for when you’re in reality?
There is this feeling I get. Listening to shoegaze particularly triggers it, it’s the nagging feeling that I’m forgetting something, something important but it’s just out of my grasp. I can’t remember it, no matter how hard I try. Every time I do, my mind is covered in a haze.
But last night, I remembered it. I was staring in the mirror when I asked myself, “Where am I?” Not referring to the location, I mean where, tangibly, in the reflection do “I” reside? The part of me that identifies as me. The ego. Where is it? I mean I’m staring at it, but who is the one that is looking?
I couldn’t find it. Was it my eyes? No, that didn’t feel quite right, was it my head? Closer, but still no. My whole body? Intellectually it seemed right, but it didn’t feel complete, either. Then I started looking at the objects reflected that weren’t my body, and I realized there was no boundary between my body and the environment. Because “I", the looker, was somewhere else. It wasn’t material like the things I was looking at. It was something else in nature. It was awareness. Perception, the unfolding process, instead of the perceived or the perceiver, and its sheer relentlessness.
My world turned inside out.
I had felt this before, this familiar feeling.
That’s the annoying thing. It’s so familiar. Yet I never remember until it’s back, unfolding again.
The feeling that we are so much bigger than we realize, that we’ve been missing the forest for the trees this whole time. That we’re too caught up in things that don’t matter, that the big mysteries in this universe are being overlooked completely, that we have no idea what is going on. We’re on a floating rock and we experience things. But why the fuck are we here? If I’m not who I thought I was, who the hell are you? Who are any of us, WHAT’S GOING ON? WHY IS NO ONE TALKING ABOUT THIS?
So I’m shouting at the mirror, LET ME TALK TO THE MANAGER!!!
I got lucid. Usually, I get into this state after meditating or taking psychedelics, but my practice had fallen by the wayside the last couple weeks. This was memorable because I was the most asleep I could have been in waking life, and I abruptly gained lucidity from that.
It was just unexpected. It broke down boundaries I didn’t even know I was drawing. It made the things I saw and felt on my inner journeys more real. Because if I didn’t need to meditate or take drugs to feel this way, maybe it’s something that exists independently of meditation or drugs. Maybe it’s always going on.
Which is funny, because that’s exactly what meditation and drugs show you, but I find a hard time fully believing it outside of those contexts. It’s like if you lived in a world where everything looked black and white, but every time you entered a specific enchanted forest your vision turned sparkling vivid technicolor, and every time you walked out things were black and white again. You’d think colors were an enchanted forest thing. But then one day while sweeping the floors in the comfort of your own home far away from the enchanted forest, all the colors turned on in your vision. You can see how this would be a potentially bewildering experience.
I’m writing this down because I don’t want to forget. I’ve been keeping a dream journal the last 7 months. Every morning when I wake up I pull up the memo on my phone and record my dreams in as much detail as I can recall before they fade away. After that, I only have my notes to go by.
I can only tell you it felt like the most important thing in the world to me—what I saw in that enchanted forest but which also exists everywhere else too—but I can’t tell you exactly what it is, because I don’t remember right now.
This entry is all I will have to go by. I just need enough to find my way back next time. A reality check is, after all, just a signpost.