Last week's trip to Matsu was as excruciating as I expected. The only consolation was that there was no on-the-bus karaoke as the islands of Matsu are so small, there are no extended periods of time on the bus, and there was more Mandarin spoken, not just Taiwanese, so I didn't feel totally shut out and isolated.

The place itself was well-worth visiting for its historicity. The reason why Taiwan holds several islands so close to the mainland is because right after the Nationalists lost the Chinese Civil War to the Communists in 1949 and retreated to the island of Taiwan, they immediately established strongholds on Matsu and Kinmen with the intent that they would be the footholds from which to launch attacks to re-take the Chinese mainland.

That never happened, but the islands became highly militarized, with posturing not totally unlike between North and South Korea or India and Pakistan. Enemies warily watching each other across the border.

Taiwan ended decades of martial law in the 80s, and by the 90s began demilitarizing Kinmen and Matsu, allowing them to develop their economies, which largely are comprised of Taiwan's signature liquors (Kinmen Kaoliang 56 and Matsu's Tunnel 88) and tourism.

The Matsu archipelago consists of, well, many islands, but just a few main islands. We visited the two biggest ones, connected by a 20-minute speed boat ride, and they are tiny. From any place to another destination was a very short bus ride, sometimes less than a minute, which always made me wonder why we couldn't just walk the distance.

And unlike the Taiwan mainland, the islands still retain their character of old, with traditional architecture from the early 20th century currently undergoing refurbishment for tourism purposes.

It was excruciating just because it was traveling with my uncle, who although means well, still lives on a planet of his own. Interesting is that he had trouble sleeping, and as a man-animal who is driven by his desires and getting what he wants, he isn't the type who takes well to not being able to get that basic daily elixir called sleep.

As insomnia is old hat to me, sleep is take it or leave it, and it was almost with delight that I lay pretending to sleep to hear someone else going through it, the pacing, the grunts of frustration, finally turning on the TV. Newbie. Apparently insomnia loves company.

Not social company in my case, though, I for most part was listening to music through the night, and him not being the most observant person in the world, likely didn't even notice that I wasn't asleep, even when my hand moved every few minutes to adjust volume or check a song name.

There was one point on one of the two nights, I forget which, that I had an experience that I'm not sure what to make of. I've been trying to re-create it and have been unsuccessful. It may have been the product of that specific situation with those particular stressors, including someone else awake in the room, from whom I was concealing that I was awake.

On one of the nights, probably around 4 in the morning, I turned off my iPod shuffle and determined to mentally will myself to sleep. It sounded counter-intuitive to even myself at the time. How do you will yourself to sleep when sleep is a state where the will is lost?

I think I broke something. I ended up in a state where I wasn't asleep, but it wasn't anything like previous quasi-lucid dreaming states I've been in before.

My previous experiences were that I was lucid and clearly conscious in the dream, but I didn't have awareness that I was dreaming or control over the elements in the dream, which I think defines lucid dreaming. But it was more than normal dreaming because I was in a state of self-awareness, rather than just the mental-habit, subconscious meandering of ordinary dreams.

This time I immediately went into a state where I knew I wasn't consciously awake – my direct connection with my physical body was no longer there – but I was self-aware in a manner similar to my previous experiences. The way I thought to describe it immediately afterwards was that I felt I had accessed a separate "dream realm", where the energy of what forms dreams is channeled.

I wasn't dreaming, I wasn't in a dream, but I had access to dream images that I could "pull down" and sample. It sounds weird to me now, but that's how I would word the description. I don't remember if or how I "chose" what dreams to sample.

Maybe it was like window shopping for dreams, but what it felt like is that if I wanted a dream, this was where to go; this is where they come from. The energy is instantly transformed by our subjective experience and psychology into dreams, but the basic energy is clay, the medium that makes the dreams possible.

I know this is self-serving, me projecting my own theories on my own experiences, but it made me think of the bardo of sleep/dreams in some differentiations of the bardos in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. A lot of teachers in the West point to 4 bardos, the life bardo comprising one, and then the 3 death bardos.

But in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the life bardo is separated into 3 as well: the bardo of waking, the bardo of sleep/dreaming, and the bardo of meditation. I think it's fair for the teachers to combine the living bardos. The subtleties may be too challenging for Westerners, and the pursuit of understanding them impracticable with the Western lifestyle. But it's possible that a state like that dream realm is what is meant by the bardo of sleep/dreaming.

Feeling that it was a special realm where the currents of energy are the source of dreams might add to my thoughts on human consciousness being formed from some basic, natural energy that pervades the universe that evolved in conjunction with biological life on Earth and became attached and enmeshed with it.

Dying releases it from a physical existence, but the imprints of the physical existence remain and as if it has been given a life of its own to be attracted back to another physical form, instead of melting back into the raw universal energy.

When humanity becomes extinct, the energy will have no choice to either melt back into the basic energy, or may continue attaching itself to whatever life remains and being reincarnated as lower animals and continuing to evolve.