Englewood Cliffs, NJ

I had one of those “dreams” last night, not really a dream, but a semi-conscious experience that I know I’ve written about before, but still haven’t identified with a label. I just don’t know what to call it. I feel like whenever it happens, I write about it, but since I don’t know how to identify it or refer to what I’ve written before, I end up writing about it anew.

They started when I was in my early teens, and they’ve recurred throughout my life with varying frequency. I’m pretty sure it happened at least once in Taiwan, in my first apartment. It always happens while I’m drifting away to sleep, and it's a state where my mind feels fully conscious, I’m totally aware and thinking, but my body is not in my willful control.

Sometimes I’m completely immobile and sometimes I can “move around”. Sometimes it occurs suddenly with a jolt, other times it fades in while I’m drifting off to sleep. That’s what happened this time, I was drifting off, but then I drifted back to consciousness, only I realized I couldn’t move, and I knew it was one of those experiences.

I was still in my bed and I kept trying to move. Finally I was able to move my legs and I kept kicking them up in the air and swinging them around (kinda having fun with it) because I still couldn’t move my upper body.

Then I managed to turn myself over to my left and the space I was in kinda felt like water. It wasn’t water, but it felt “water-y”. My body sank a bit down through the mattress and when I breathed in, it felt like I was breathing in warm, breathable water.

It felt like I was floating, and I remembered that I had thought before about treating this as a possible death experience. Maybe this was what it was like in one of the stages of death, existing in what is referred to as a "mental body". So I put myself in that mindset that I had died, and to accept it and let everything about my previous life go. I also asked myself if I was ready and willing to die, and the annoying answer came back that I wasn’t. Just a habituated shock of panic about dying.

Who knows? Maybe that is what death is like. My consciousness was moving around, but if someone was in the room watching me, I would still have been lying there in bed.

Anyway, I floated over to one corner of my room, then floated upwards to the ceiling, getting my bearings and my ability to move around. Then I floated out the door (don’t remember if I had to open it or if I floated right through it), and in my parents’ house there’s a balcony that looks over the vast family room.

I remember propelling myself off the balcony down to the family room floor, and I remember thinking of trying to get out of the house and enter other people's houses. It’s the skeptic in me. I was thinking if this was an objective experience, then I should be able to go into other people's houses and experience something not in my subjective memory or experience.

If it was a subjective experience, then the only things I could experience would be things I’m already familiar with. Of course, the problem with this is that I do have an imagination, and even if I did manage to get into someone else’s house, how do I know it’s not just a product of my overactive imagination?

But as I got outside through the family room sliding-glass porch doors, the experience started to fall apart and fade.

The final image was looking out in that direction, east with the orange lights of New York reflecting off the clouds, looking through what looked like the silhouettes of giant blades of grass, blowing in a breeze, but not always full silhouette. Sometimes I could make out the details and they were very, very clear and vivid. I remember thinking what a great image that would be for a film (even though thinking about it now, it isn’t).

December 25, 5:02 p.m. - from my room in New Jersey

December 26, 1:08 p.m. - My Yamaha drums and Peugeot bike in the pool room in the basement. My drums are stored when I leave and it's always a delight to set them up when I return.