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am 1:27 Thursday 14 August 2003
If you feel you've seen this page before, just
skip it!
(Dream) An absolutely silent mosquito flies over my body, across
my face, and as I track it, I suddenly reach up and slap my hands
together, killing it. (Fin)
The sound of the clap wakes me up, and I lie in bed a moment, thinking
about it, criticizing myself. I relive the dream, watching the mosquito
flying across my face once again .... Aha! I had been watching
it! That's how I knew where the mosquito was, so in my sleep, I
could slap it.
Except, I tell myself critically, lying in the dark, my eyes were
actually shut. It was a stupid dream. Then, I continue to realize,
I had actually used my hands and arms in outside physical reality,
to reach up and make a loud clap. Now that was a first. I had sleep-clapped.
How droll.
I remembered an equally crazy experiment I had made about five
years ago, this time in the opposite direction. In this experiment,
I had decided, if there really was a mystical self somewhere inside
me, I should be able to close my eyes while driving, and somehow
see. Now, in fact, I had just driven over the Bay Bridge on my way
home after work, four-thirty in the afternoon, at fifty miles an
hour.
I shut my eyes for about three seconds, then opened them. My hands
had been stiff on the steering wheel, and I hadn't swerved and killed
myself, or anything. Later, and this was one of the few times my
teacher used direct telepathy on me, he touched my mind during our
early evening meeting, marked the memory of my freeway eyes-wide-shut
experiment, and said in my mind, Don't do that! And with
those words I realized, I can't ignore the physical requirement
of keeping my eyes open during driving.
I remembered something else at the time. "You don't have to
do anything, really," David told us. "It's not something
you have to look for inside yourself. It's something that will find
you."
Now, as I lay in my bed, not able to sleep after that stupid dream,
I felt the lightest sensation across both eyelids at once. It was
almost a ping across the surface of my still-closed eyes, maybe
the sensation of an effervescent bubble popping across my eyelashes.
Something, I realized, had connected to my optic nerve.
So I visualized the dream once again, about the silent mosquito
I had been watching with my eyes shut, then visualized writing what
I am writing now, and making this particular page my URL home page,
then reaching up with both arms for a single Slap!
Except the critical part of myself is far from dead, and despite
the irony of the dream's loud clap having woken me up, and the notion
of making this page my home page, I realized what I had been visualizing
in my mind had been a display on a new browser, and a new browser
has nothing at all to do with a URL home page, much less a new computer.
So there! And why is the critical part of myself still alive and
kicking?
With that, I recreated the experiment I had made several years
ago, and as I thought it over, added one extra step. I'm riding
down the freeway, all right, at fifty miles an hour, and my eyes
are actually shut. Okay, I realize silently, Now just
put your hands over your head and clap!
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