As far back as I can recall, I have experienced this floating sensation. People talk about out-of-body experiences as spiritual awakenings, but I have found mine to strike me with the utmost fear. My very core aches, longing to be reunited with my spirit. I cannot remember a single time when they were last together. I have always been removed from my existence, my essence severed ever so slightly from my physical entity.
My life has been lived from a distance.
What seems like an eternity ago, I had a dream in which I was somehow trapped between the physical and the spiritual. I lay on a white bed, surrounded by white walls, and those walls enclosed within them the entire universe. I held my hand up to my face and everything began to quiver ever so slightly at first, then with a challenging gusto that frightened me and frightened the walls themselves. Suddenly I was laughing hysterically and all fear melted and slid away from me in a wisp of thick grey mist. My laugh was careless and pure, unlike most false hearty laughs, and it seemed to crawl through me like a malicious insect. It skimmed beneath the skin to find any fleeting feeling other than happiness. Its job soon became clear: to smother anything that did not make me happy.
I woke with a dry throat and a shaky voice in the middle of the night, along with a self-satisfied feeling that since has never forsaken me. Years have passed and I pride myself on my ability to make myself happy in the most hopeless of situations. I watch my own life unfold from a vantage point high above reality, where details lose significance and facts seep into musings. I am always safe, always pleased, thanks to this detachment that allows me to let go of all the putrid and vile happenings in life.
Yet, there is always a half-buried emotion in the negligible regions of my conscious mind that warns me of a tragic loss. Perhaps the numb floating and impersonal distance, although making me perfectly content, took something from me that all people should have. Perhaps it took from me the real human experience of feeling infinitely, the overwhelming cornucopia of senses and emotions that we were meant to be able to feel. Perhaps I lost out on all that, but that dream will forever be a defining moment for me, a monumental night spent asleep while the rest of my life and how it was to be lived was laid out before me.
I believe everyone has this dream once in a lifetime. In my dream, I became my own soul mate, it enabled me to love myself in such a way that any other affection is simply surplus. In another dream, perhaps a young girl is destined to lead a cheap life and die a cheap death. That is the dream’s decision to make, and never our own.
Once the dream is had, we cannot change what is to come. Our decisions, our experiences, our firsts, our lasts, our precious friendships with fellow dreamers- all are results of the way we feel and how we act on those feelings, and feeling is something we can never control. In a world with little we cannot change or improve or build on, feeling escapes our reach.
The dream itself is a second soul, whispering to us what people we shall be. I woke up from that dream, but it lived on throughout my life. It is a dream I have never escaped, neither I nor any other dreamer. One can never escape oneself
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