Early Signs of Clues

I don’t have many lucid memories from my early childhood.  Most are episodic, and lacking context, like watching slides projected on a screen from the random vacations of strangers.  The background linking them all together has all been pieced together from stories told by my sisters and parents, and has given me a little insight to them beyond the impressionistic, emotive memory I have of life before the age of 10.

One of the few things I recall vividly is my dreams.  I have theories as to why, to be explored on another page, at another time, however I believe that my dreams were my young mind’s way of helping me cope with a knowledge beyond my years.  I do remember understanding people and events on a level deeper than most kids my age, than most of the adults around me.  I just didn’t know it was unique, or what to do with it all.  I think my dreams were a way of processing my experiences to help me stay, well, sane.

Sometimes, though, the dreams terrified me.  I didn’t have the wisdom then to understand that what occurred in my dreams was a coping mechanism, an attempt of my psyche to show my consciousness what was happening in the form of allegory, to illustrate the process of emotional absorption and help to remind me to hold onto myself. At 35 I get it. I see the connections.  But at five, I was simply horrified.

At night when I laid alone ‘neath the rose tinted lamp next to my bed, slipping into that pre-sleep state where the lines between reality and dream are fluid and shifting, I would sometimes feel convinced that another organism inhabited my body.  A life unknown to man in any physical sense, but familiar to men who allow for time to feel.   I sensed it…black, slick, its sticky stretch, slowly seeping in, seizing, suppressing, saturating my every cell, suffocating my Self with it’s solemn and isolated sadness.  At times it reached my chest and inundated my heart and lungs with its thickness, making breathing a task.  When finally it reached my brain all logic escaped, all rationality disappeared and what was me just moments before transformed into a quivering, weeping mass of pain and remorse.  And though completely filled with the life of this being, it itself was empty, and so I too acquired its void.