Waking Up.

I am not a human being. Not yet. I am primordial ooze. I have no legs, no eyes, no thought, no language.

Eventually I drip out of my bed onto the junk-covered floor and instinctively fright from the noise bouncing off of membranes I do not know I have. The pitch dark whispers to me that It is the auditory hallucination that develops first, not the illusion of sight.

Then, like being thrust into a pool of ice, the sudden sensation of freezing cold skin. Legs. Feet. Chest. Something is missing. I instinctively reach my left hand over to where the right ought to be. I find a mass of soft tissue, five digits, still attached but all sensation lost. All at once I remember that I used to have two hands and at the same time am struck with horror by the loss of part of myself, and simultaneous gaining of a piece of alien meat. A parasite, once so familiar as to have been a part of a whole, now so strange that I wish to flee, to escape its existence and wipe my mind so that I might never have known such a thing as a right hand. As I grab at the sack of bones hanging from my wrist it begins to tingle with sharp pain, then comes alive once again. In sheer minutes my new hand is indistinguishable from the one it replaced. Throughout this ordeal I have become self-aware without realizing it.

Story Telling

Re-reading The Sandman which I read the one time almost 20 years ago. One thing I’m finding particularly fun are Lucian’s books in the library in The Dreaming.  The Merrie Comedie of the Redemption of Doctor Faustus made me smile just now. It’s such an odd experience re-reading something so many years after the first time. I’m finding Sandman more “cute” than I did originally.

I did learn of Emperor Norton I from the story “Three Septembers and a January” which was always my favorite single. Just re-read it. I think these stories might have had a really huge impact on me as a still totally ignorant youngin’.  

I’ve also come up with a theory about why I seek out stories as I do. And, if it were up to me, they’d be told to me by an old man or woman as we sat by a fire. I never knew my grandparents and I was raised by Hollywood and TV. The death of my grandparents before my birth always bothered me. Other kids had them. I did not. 

I romanticized what a grandparent was and I created this mythical figure of The Grandparent when I was a child. The Grandparent would tell my parents when they were acting unfairly, remind them that they were once children too, tell me stories of WWI and WWII (my father’s father fought in the second world war), The Great Depression, living as a single mother in the 1940s and 1950s (my father’s mother divorced my grandfather in the 1940s they were homeless, stayed at friends’ homes and in shelters.), and so on. I knew the basics of the stories because my parents made reference to them, but not until I became and adult and my father too old to work 80 hours a week have I had the pleasure of learning his stories. I feel like that little child in front of the roaring fire listening to the old man tell her stories of yore. He’s someone’s grandfather after all — I’ve four nieces and three nephews. 

I have this notion to record him as he tells the stories so that I can transcribe them one day and write his biography. But, something always comes up. Also, i don’t have digital recorder. Maybe I’ll go buy one. I might have to hide it, though. He’s agreed to be recorded, but as soon as he feels the pressure he becomes shy and forgetful. 

I know myself fairly well by now and so I’m not pretending any of this will come to fruition. Still, it’s possible to believe in things that unlikely or even entirely mythical while remaining reasonable — if you’re me. My mind is split into two distinct sectors: one believes everything insane is not only possible, but likely. The other believes nothing — it searches for evidence and is never satisfied.  For the longest time they were at odds with each other, but, somewhat recently, they made peace. 

I wonder what this will mean for the future. 

Back in the early late 80s/early 90s the very idea of the “future” was as incomprehensible to me as every single event that would come to create the future I could not conceive of. Now, aside from memories so distant they might as well be someone else’s, I have no past.  Everything that led to this moment is a closed book, before now it was as of yet unopened. All that I am is right now. That is what it is to be detached, dissociated.

The idea of a dreamworld where all the unwritten stories are stored speaks directly to the naive Dreamer side of me — the me I let remain insane in private. I’ve always stored my memories like books on a bookshelf. Once I told them to others as stories I could put them away and the trauma was lightened more and more until it was nothing more than a story. This way my reasonable self can dismiss memories as fiction — stories to be told to grandchildren as they sit by the roaring fire.