CHANGES

Following my dream “Aerial,” I woke up in an altered state of consciousness—one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life—that I chronicled in a series of vignettes:

“Literally overnight, a startling change has come over me. I have incomprehensibly achieved a vivid sense of my life’s continuity. I am discovering the logic behind what I have done or tried to do that I didn’t perceive at the time, and I remember the bolder person that I was. She turns on like a light within me, illuminating my past. What I cried out was not, is today—my past is real.”

SPLINTER

“Don’t expect anything and you won’t be disappointed. I awoke with my throat so swollen it felt like a golf ball had lodged there. And speaking of lodged, I had the thought, as I lay there enjoying my new condition, that it was as though something had been dislodged in my brain, a great psychic splinter that had pained and aggrieved. The truth is, much of this time I don’t feel so different. But I keep passing before some door in my mind that stands slightly ajar and strikes me with an edge of light from within—the reality of my past, the coherence of my personality. I have been incredulous for years, like a pitiful, dumbfounded animal, over my total and unaccountable loss of vitality—capacity for intellectual assertion, effective will, rational control over my feelings. How could I have had these things and lost them? How could I have been loved and not experience a trace of the feeling that I had been? How could I have achieved, yet come to feel so small and drab? How could I, after attaining a measure of self-possession, have become stuttering, intimidated, and withdrawn? How is it possible that I could have worked through so many problems, only to find, years later, that the sum of my unhappiness was the same?”

And here, I feel obliged to observe in hindsight, “But I hadn’t been loved; I’d only imagined I was, after Britte’s declaration before I sailed off to Spain.”