I tried starting a new journal this way a few weeks ago (before I commenced this memoir): I was sitting in my comfortable chair in the living room. It was close to 9 PM. I had the place to myself and was reading a book. I had turned out all the lights except for the one over the chair that I light for reading. I had let the book close on my hand, marking my spot, letting myself doze off. When I came to my senses, I was looking down at my book. What I saw was my whole hand with a silvery mist above the part of my hand that was in the book. As my attention became more acute, the "mist" quickly filled in and became the book, obscuring my hand. But I have a clear memory of having seen through the book as if it had become momentarily invisible.
Why was this so important to me, important enough to kick off a journal with it? As an experience it doesn't fit anywhere, but I am glad it happened. It would have been on my bucket list if I had one, right next to "visit New Zealand".
It is a source of frustration to me that the most interesting things that have happened to me during my life, as a rule, only happened once. On the positive side, this has made me a better student of my experience, while on the negative side I have to wonder what I missed, never to experience again, when I wasn't paying attention. If things like this happened every day, we would probably have workshops for seeing through the veil of material reality, a useful ability to be sure! But, repeatable or not, one reason I am making so much of this episode is, it connects me to my father who used to remind me, when I was growing up, that the solidity and opacity of matter is only an illusion that is fostered by macrophysical reality. Quantum reality is something else and he wanted me to be aware of it. The younger I was the more he would simplify the science, but as I matured, he would explain the theory, and I would listen, trying to follow. He even told this funny story of a physicist he was aware of at MIT, a brilliant eccentric, who was in the habit of walking around in big rubber boots so he wouldn't fall through the vast spaces between molecules. (I don't know if my father was making this up, but it made a big impression on me, that brilliant people could be so helpless in the everyday world.) In fact there is far more space in matter than there is solid structure. In my imagination, the guy with the boots, who thought it was something of a miracle that he wasn't sailing through the earth, always looked a little like my father. My father wasn't just messing with us. I knew he wasn't joking, so seeing through my book was a wonderful affirmation of his catechism. I wish he were here so I could tell him that I finally experienced the truth of what he was describing!
Another time, also unique, I was sitting on the sofa, across the room. Once again, I was reading and had dozed. As I woke up, right when I was returning to waking consciousness, there was a little old man sitting in the child's rocker that happened to be right in front of me, and also there was a woman of small stature, but not quite as small as the old man, standing in the entrance to the stairs to the basement. She was wearing a bonnet and was dressed in several layers of long skirts or dresses that made her appear to be overdressed but later it occurred to me she was dressed in layers for warmth. Both the old man and this woman exuded friendliness and they were both looking right at me. The old man seemed cheerful and was smiling with his whole face.
These are anecdotes I want to share, not just because they are part of the story I am telling, but because it is time to try to explain them.
Two other examples of hypnopompic perceptions have to do with how my perception of my book, any book, changes when I start falling asleep while reading if I resist the impulse to relinquish consciousness. As I refocus on the page I see drawings or complex patterns on the page and sometimes certain words or phrases are printed in red, or it is like a palimpsest, as if the book was printed over an older text, always in red. A few times, when I was reading Funny Times, which is printed in black and white like a newspaper, the cartoons appeared in color and the colors were appropriate like the Sunday comics. These effects remain on the page just long enough for me to register them and then they fade away.
III
I have come around to seeing consciousness as a dimension in itself, which means that what is common to every experience I have had so far, of other realities, is that I am conscious (or aware) of myself experiencing these other realities or I am aware of having experienced something even if I don't recall exactly what I experienced. For this to make sense I have to explain what I mean by "I" and what I mean by "experience".
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