Even While Awake

“They say that even while awake, you dream; and that waking itself may only be another form of dreaming.”

He could see strips of light finding their way through the cracks of his shades. He put his hands in front of his face, spreading his fingers just wide enough to make the light soften. What he saw became many narrow rays, divided by his fingers and multiplied by the blinds.

He imagined each small wound of brightness as a kind of portal, connecting him to the outside world and to everything moving within it.

He could see far dry fields through them, golden brown in the low sun, a man working in solitude, dry brittle paper, ink letters on thick dusty pages in a shelter, waves, a leaf still wet from the morning fog. All these images seemed familiar, not because he had seen them before, but because they came to him with the strange closeness of memory.

And although he knew they were not coming from his memory, he could not call them foreign either. The man in the field bent down, and for a moment he felt something of the tiredness in his own back. The leaf held the morning fog, and he felt the cold of it before he had time to think of it as cold. None of this belonged to him, but it also did not feel far away enough to belong only to someone else.

Most likely, if you had asked him yesterday, in his waking state, he would have said these people and places were foreign to him. But since there was just light, and in that moment he did not know who he was with the same certainty as before, this answer did not come as easily.

He did not reach for anything, although it felt close to him. The things themselves were not in front of him, he knew that, but still he did not feel the need to get closer. It was strange, because usually what was far away made him want to reach for it. But here the distance did not feel like distance in the same way.

After he felt the first wave of images sinking in, he took a new look at the light. What if this light he saw was a symbol? And what if the movement of the light, the different tones and colors, had some kind of rhyme?

He tried to follow this observation, but the tones and colors of the light, and just as much the images themselves, were too different in their appearance. There was no clear rhyme or pattern, or at least none he could hold onto for long.

Still, he loved rhymes and patterns. He was not really a man of logic, more of symbols and rhymes. Symbols for him were simple signs for complex things. Things many people could understand, but that still held more than one meaning. Rhymes were similar. They made separate things sound as if they belonged together, even when he did not know how.

Maybe this was why he stayed with the light. It gave him the feeling that things could belong together without becoming easy. For a long time, his own thoughts had done the opposite. They moved on and on, produced more lines, more explanations, and still, after all of it, he often felt he had not moved very far. He had been waiting, though he would not have called it waiting, for something that did not come only from himself.

Again, images of people, of old moments, flashed through the light. The effort people had put into making things. Old wooden tools. Dried-up ink on a peeled metal chair. The laces of a handmade shoe in the corner of a workshop. These images now started to follow one another, remaining for a while and then dissolving back into light.

This process continued. If there had been no dissolving, one could probably have found a rhythm in these images. But with the dissolving, with each image returning to the light, the movement was more like a wave.

After a while, what happened between him and the images became harder to dismiss. The paper was no longer only thick and dusty. It had warmth in it, a dry warmth, as if it had kept something from the hands that had touched it or from the room in which it had waited for years. The leaf was not only wet in the light, but cold with the morning still on it. The tools carried something of the heaviness of use, not their own heaviness exactly, but the heaviness of the hands that had held them for many hours.

None of this came to him as a full sensation. It was not like touching the paper, or holding the leaf, or lifting the tools himself. It came more as hints, but the hints stayed longer now. They reached him before he could decide what they were.

Of course, he could have called it a dream. It would have been the easiest word for it. But the word did not change anything about the light, or about the paper, or about the cold that still seemed to come from the leaf.

He did not follow the thought immediately. It stood there for a moment, somewhere beside the light, and seemed neither wrong nor useful. The images continued, appearing and dissolving, each one returning to the brightness it had come from. And each time they dissolved, it did not feel as if they were gone, only that they had gone back into the light.

For a while he stayed in this uncertainty, without trying to leave it. The light moved slightly through the shades. One strip widened, another became thinner. The images became quieter, less like images and more like something left behind by them. He could not hold onto any single one for long, but he could still feel their nearness in the light.

Then something in him loosened, not suddenly, but as if the state had reached a natural end.

He woke up soaking wet, like his body wanted to flush out something within him.

On other mornings, he would roll to his side in order to get a few more minutes of sleep, but this time all he wanted to do was stay and think. Or not even think, because thinking already seemed like something that would take the experience and make it smaller.

Not long after, he saw the light through his shades, flickering. Only with imagination was he able to see the same images he had seen before. A little more willpower was asked of him now, but he knew, or maybe only felt, that they were still there. Not there in the same way, not coming toward him by themselves, but not gone either.

The room was dimly lit by sunset, unordered, just a laptop on his desk, many empty plastic bottles beside it, a tissue for his pollen allergy, many books stacked from different places, nothing related to his work. More something to ease himself, to fill his mind with words that were not only his own, to swim in sentences that soothed him and in which he saw meaning. A pencil. Headphones. A wireless keyboard he barely used anymore. Open notebooks with pencil shavings, plastic pencil cases.

He stayed where he was for a while.

The room looked the same as before, which almost annoyed him. The bottles were still there, the books still stacked without order, the laptop still half open on the desk. Nothing in the room seemed to know what had happened. Only the light through the shades looked slightly different to him now, although maybe even that was only because he kept looking at it.

After a while he stood up from the bed.

His body still felt strange, not weak exactly, but as if it had only now remembered its own weight. The floor was cold under his feet. He walked to his desk and sat down, without turning on the laptop.

For a while he only looked at the open notebook in front of him. There were old beginnings in it, crossed-out sentences, little fragments that had once felt important and now looked like they had tried too hard to become something. He did not dislike them. They were his, after all. But he saw in them the same movement he knew too well, this reaching for an idea before anything had really arrived.

He took the pencil.

The first sentence that came to him was:

I had a dream.

He did not write it down.

It sounded wrong, or not wrong exactly, but too easy. It put the light somewhere behind him, in sleep, where it could be kept and maybe forgotten.

Then another sentence came:

I woke up.

He did not write that either.

It made the room too certain. It made waking sound like a place one arrived at completely, and he did not feel that he had arrived completely anywhere.

Through the shades, the light moved slightly.

Nothing appeared in it now. No field, no man, no brittle paper, no leaf, no workshop. Only light, divided by the blinds, touching the desk and the back of his hand.

Still, he could not call it empty.

He wrote slowly, not because he knew what to write, but because he wanted to put one sentence near the experience without closing it.

The light was not empty.

He looked at the sentence for a while.

It was simple. Maybe too simple. It did not say enough, but it also did not say too much. And for now this felt closer than trying to explain what had happened.

He left the pencil on the page and stayed there, with the books and bottles around him, and the light still coming through the shades.