The Fine Line of Consciousness

Almost every night, I have a kind of ethereal experience.

Consider sleep, the concept of it. You lie down (hopefully) and recharge your body for almost half a day. While your wounds are repaired, your hair extended, and your ATP restored, your brain deals with its own kind of polishings.

They say that dreaming is your brain's way of sorting out problems. While I agree that this may be true, I also believe that sleep elevates our brains to different energy levels that perhaps aren't accessible in full consciousness. Dreams have to be more than routine siftings of reality. I've had dreams that have nothing to do with anything I've ever seen or experienced, and I just think that the mind's sense of interpretation is a completely fascinating thing.

Anyway, sometime in between these REM moments, I become sort of "half-awake." I don't know if this happens first thing in the morning or in the middle of the night. Basically when I've just come out of the unconsciousness of sleep.

During these few seconds, I have a sudden, overwhelming sense of my inevitable demise. I am human; I am mortal. I will die, just like every other living thing. Images of space and great abysses fly in somewhere around this time, and I am conscious of a silence. A silence of nothingness. I feel dead. It's as close as I've come to an "outer-body" experience, but I don't see myself outside of my body--I just feel it.

I'm always conscious of this sort of thing, and the whole bridging the gap between consciences is not new for me. I've just finally decided to write it down after reading a similar feeling expressed by Virginia Woolf in "Mrs. Dalloway."

These quotes reminded me of myself:

"...this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing--nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown."

"She felt very young, at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything, at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day."

"Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?"