I had a strange little experience last night that has me wondering.
I was sound asleep, although I'm a fairly light sleeper. Little noises tend to wake me up. One did, a scritchyscratching at my bedroom door. I was in the middle a vivid dream about being somewhere in an unfamiliar house or building. Dimly, I recognized that the sound was that of my youngest and stupidest cat, who is baffled by doors, and wanted out of the bedroom, but had managed to push the door shut rather than simply exit through the eight-inch opening I'd left for her convenience. It has happened before; she has the learning capacity of a goldfish, good thing she's otherwise charming. I got up, in the pitch dark, intending to take the five or six familiar steps to open the door. But – I was in a strange place, a room I didn't know. I banged into two different walls of this odd place, walls that weren't familiar to me at all, that were in the wrong places.
I felt my way back to the bed, found the lamp (it was not quite in the right place, either), and switched it on. Only then did all the normal framework of my bedroom return. I opened the door, let the beast out, switched off the light and went back to bed, only to lie awake for at least an hour. There had been ten or fifteen seconds of a kind of shared existence between the physical reality of my bedroom and the dream reality of the strange place, intermingled in a semi-conscious way. It got me wondering if this kind of experience might not be what certain kinds of mental illness make for some people, all the time, or at least sporadically. Some interior landscape that interferes with or amalgamates with perceptions of the exterior one.
Tonight I'm blocking that damn door open.
caw
I was sound asleep, although I'm a fairly light sleeper. Little noises tend to wake me up. One did, a scritchyscratching at my bedroom door. I was in the middle a vivid dream about being somewhere in an unfamiliar house or building. Dimly, I recognized that the sound was that of my youngest and stupidest cat, who is baffled by doors, and wanted out of the bedroom, but had managed to push the door shut rather than simply exit through the eight-inch opening I'd left for her convenience. It has happened before; she has the learning capacity of a goldfish, good thing she's otherwise charming. I got up, in the pitch dark, intending to take the five or six familiar steps to open the door. But – I was in a strange place, a room I didn't know. I banged into two different walls of this odd place, walls that weren't familiar to me at all, that were in the wrong places.
I felt my way back to the bed, found the lamp (it was not quite in the right place, either), and switched it on. Only then did all the normal framework of my bedroom return. I opened the door, let the beast out, switched off the light and went back to bed, only to lie awake for at least an hour. There had been ten or fifteen seconds of a kind of shared existence between the physical reality of my bedroom and the dream reality of the strange place, intermingled in a semi-conscious way. It got me wondering if this kind of experience might not be what certain kinds of mental illness make for some people, all the time, or at least sporadically. Some interior landscape that interferes with or amalgamates with perceptions of the exterior one.
Tonight I'm blocking that damn door open.
caw
These seem to be what all ghost photos are of. That would really taint my wish.
