Sometimes as I lie in bed and try to fall asleep, I feel like I am floating across the room. In the dark room, with my eyes closed, lost in thought – –
Some significant self-realization, like the truth that not only can we say no to others, but that it we too can say no to ourselves, or that a social encounter actually went differently than I had initially thought, or that the things I need at the store are eggs, body lotion, wd-40, & I need to check if they sell that black hockey tape that I used to tape my hula hoops, or a story that is eagerly waiting to be told is knocking on my mind’s door and begging for a sheet of paper – –
I will suddenly notice it feels like my consciousness is wavering, humming physically in the space of the darkness, the static edges of reality unpinned by the white noise of the box fan in the corner. The edges of my being seem to echo, and throw off lines of color, outlined in a subtle color spectrum. I’ll lift my head to look around, feeling the queerness of the unattached motion. If I stand to look out the window will I float away? Off through the crack of the window and the frame, through the hole in its meshed screen, trailing like smoke across the evening wind, higher into the sky until I lose all of my edges entirely, becoming one with the sky?
Once I read that the soul and inner consciousness is attached to the center of ones being, through the solar plexus. It is because of this connection that our spirits are made physical; without this tether to our present reality we would wander away and lose ourselves. The thought brings the realization that the heaviest part of my body is my stomach, and I come crashing back into my physical being. The sensation is akin to the life-long memory of a recurring dream: falling through the darkness, no idea of where you are falling from, nor where you are falling to.
Even after all of these years I find myself crying out from even the deepest sleep into a sudden wakeful panic. I will sit up, coffin nail straight, and search my surroundings. In the blessed darkness I will clutch at my solar plexus and search for the connection, grateful it was just a dream again.
