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Feb. 13th, 2002 05:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaI had the strangest experience this morning. I was not quite asleep, not quite awake. I knew as it was happening that it wasn't real, yet it was more vivid and detailed and multisensory than any dream.
I was lying on my stomach in bed, and it suddenly seemed to me that I was in Lane's bed - just as it was when I used to visit her in Portland. Instead of the slightly sagging double bed I sleep in now, I felt underneath me the featherbed covered in black and white-striped flannel, and the cool firm cotton-sheeted futon below that. I sensed the grey Portland light flitering through the window, in an intangibly different way than the Maryland light does. I felt the chill of the air against my exposed shoulder and felt the sense memory of how cold settled into that house. I sensed the position of the bed in the room, walls behind and to the right of me. All of these sensory impressions were perfectly detailed, perfectly mundane... just as it feels to wake up in a bed and become slowly aware of your surroundings.
"This isn't real," I told myself, and I knew it to be true. But at the same time I had the vivid sensory knowledge of how it would be to turn my head and brush my face against Lane's hair. How it would be softer and finer than the hair of anyone I've slept with since. I inhaled the scent of her shampoo. I had a sense of her size and weight in the bed next to me.
"This isn't real," I told myself again, and this time I imposed some discipline: I started singing to myself in my head, a slow and rhythmic song, a song with lots of lyrics to remember, a song with no connection to her. And the song occupied my mind in an orderly fashion, and gradually I fell asleep again, and when I awoke I knew where I was.
I knew yesterday that she was on my mind, although I still don't know why. But I never imagined that I still had memories like this, or that the past could impose itself on me with such perfectly realistic mimicry.
I was lying on my stomach in bed, and it suddenly seemed to me that I was in Lane's bed - just as it was when I used to visit her in Portland. Instead of the slightly sagging double bed I sleep in now, I felt underneath me the featherbed covered in black and white-striped flannel, and the cool firm cotton-sheeted futon below that. I sensed the grey Portland light flitering through the window, in an intangibly different way than the Maryland light does. I felt the chill of the air against my exposed shoulder and felt the sense memory of how cold settled into that house. I sensed the position of the bed in the room, walls behind and to the right of me. All of these sensory impressions were perfectly detailed, perfectly mundane... just as it feels to wake up in a bed and become slowly aware of your surroundings.
"This isn't real," I told myself, and I knew it to be true. But at the same time I had the vivid sensory knowledge of how it would be to turn my head and brush my face against Lane's hair. How it would be softer and finer than the hair of anyone I've slept with since. I inhaled the scent of her shampoo. I had a sense of her size and weight in the bed next to me.
"This isn't real," I told myself again, and this time I imposed some discipline: I started singing to myself in my head, a slow and rhythmic song, a song with lots of lyrics to remember, a song with no connection to her. And the song occupied my mind in an orderly fashion, and gradually I fell asleep again, and when I awoke I knew where I was.
I knew yesterday that she was on my mind, although I still don't know why. But I never imagined that I still had memories like this, or that the past could impose itself on me with such perfectly realistic mimicry.
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Date: 2002-02-14 09:04 am (UTC)Yeah, I did. I didn't want to be in her bed, and reminding myself that I wasn't in fact there didn't prevent me from going on to have even more detailed sense impressions. I very much wanted to stop that at once before things went any further.
Maybe I'm just not grasping the full import of "more vivid and detailed and multisensory than any dream", because many of my dreams feel so real to me that I'm unsure when I wake up whether it was a dream or the previous day. So much so that when a dream feels...well, "dreamy", I notice it.
I've sometimes had dreams that were very naturalistic in feel, and I've even had to discreetly check with someone else about whether a particular event occurred. (It's never actually that I have no idea whether it happened or not - it's usually along the lines of a lingering doubt. "That didn't happen... did it?")
The disorienting thing about this experience was that it was so mundane, that it was completely lacking in narrative, and that it overlapped with my actual physical reality. I was lying in bed, and I knew I was lying in bed, and I had the sensory impressions of lying in bed - but the sensory impressions didn't match reality. I think I would have had a much easier time separating a dream narrative (with a plot, or at least actions) from reality. I mean, if you become even marginally more alert during a dream you can realize that you're not actually moving or speaking. But with this, becoming more aware of my physical self didn't help at all.