Something weird happened yesterday night.
I’m still not sure how i managed to decrypt whatever it was i felt, especially in my half lucid stage, but i did. Let me try to explain it as coherently as i can.
So i’ve been sleeping indecently early recently. This is probably a manifestation of my reading Yoshimoto’s Asleep. YES i’ve discovered how easily affected my post-novel lifestyle is by concepts from books. Actually. I didn’t realize this until about five minutes ago.
After Nothomb’s Life of Hunger i starved in the morning and ate my weight in chocolate/desserts at night just to feel the stark contrast between hunger and decadence. I started drawing after Shadow Tag. And Asleep’s made me nap hours in the day, without compromising my obscene ~11pm bed time.
It’s disgusting, i know.
Anyhow. With my infantile sleep cycle comes a stranger quirk. I’d wake up exactly one hour after i sleep (and by exactly i mean by the minute), check my phone, sink back into slumber, then wake up at approximately 5am again, check my phone, sleep, then be up between the 7 – 9 range. Like Terako, sleep lies heavy when it comes. It’s like being submerged into a crop of Devil’s Snare [ref: Harry Potter], the more i try to stay awake the faster i shut down.
I think it was after the first wake when i was Alice in the rabbit hole free-falling back to sleep when this happened.
It was one of those pseudo-half lucid-dreams, but instead of going through something, i just felt something. Like if you were to break down a general dream into scenes, then pick out one scene and whatever i felt at that point, and then filter till you have a specific aspect of that emotion, and then magnify it and concentrate an entire dream with it. Something like that, that’s the best i can go with a semantic explanation. Also i was half lucid so ambiguity is inevitable.
All i remember is that it was pitch black. Not just visually, but.. everywhere and everything-ly. Just darkness. And i felt vulnerable and also scared/worried. But it wasn’t a generic fear. I think labeling it as fear is misleading. It’s an emotion you don’t have a name for – but is real and belongs to the past. Basically i was experiencing an intense emotion i am VERY sure i’d gone through, exactly as i had years ago. If that makes sense.
Yes we all feel anger, or fear, or happiness, at different points of our lives, over and over again and will continue to. But at that moment i understood that every thing we feel is intricately nuanced and varied and tied to that a specific moment. Which makes it near impossible to replicate the exact emotion you feel in another instance.
That’s why whatever happened to me was incredibly strange and disconcerting.
I felt exactly like who i was in the past (around lower secondary, i can’t be sure when exactly now), but cognitively i was in the present (which gave me the privilege of observation, yay). Back then i had nothing to worry about, really. Those were my best years so far. But all the same when you’re young and dumb and only beginning to understand emotions you can’t possibly see that. So, i was vulnerable – that was the predominant state, and afraid.. very afraid. I’m not sure of what. I was basically incapable of restraining my own fear nor did i make an effort to rationalize it.
That’s where it gets interesting.
Having to experience that one past emotion vividly was surreal, sure, but i think it happened so i could make the conclusion i did: That i’ve become so much braver. Or, if you’d like to see it in another way, impassive. And also in control.
I could afford to be vulnerable then, because as ignorant as i was, i must have known that nothing could truly hurt me in that environment and age. I allowed myself to fear without inhibition only because there really was nothing to fear – and thus that fear wouldn’t make me weaker against anything.
It’s pretty obvious that i’ve killed intensity of emotions off along the way, convinced they’re only a hindrance. I do feel, occasionally, anger, disappointment, sadness, but they’re so incredibly diluted i can’t even get myself to stay that way – numbness kicks in by reflex before it gets anywhere. The strongest of my negative emotions are second-hand; they’re on behalf of friends and loved ones. Indignation and anger and worry and fear and unhappiness – they take residence only if felt for another.
Inadvertently it’s also lessened my ability to be intensely and wholly happy. I still am most of the time that – and i’m grateful for being born an annoyingly happy gnat – but it’s a kind of happiness that comes with the knowledge that life will still dish me a lot of crap. I’m alright with that because this happens to everyone when they grow up/out.
It’s just that sometimes i’m not sure if i made the right choice in being so impassioned.
It started when i realized you can never lose if no one can get to you. So i don’t let anyone, or anything, get to me. Nothing upsets me nothing can knock me off balance. Nothing. I can deal with an inordinate amount of shittiness without it upsetting me any much. Even if it does, i bounce back so fast sometimes even i doubt its possibility. (If you want to give it a go – try expecting the worse. When you do, nothing fazes you whatever happens.) That’s the nice part of it, i guess. That i don’t get hurt.
Then again, getting hurt is part of life. Sometimes i miss that depth of emotion – although stupid and makes you vulnerable – because it makes you a little closer to living. I think that’s why there are people who love pathos in their lives, even if they don’t admit it.
Q 