Did I awaken in a dream or dream I was awake?

I’d been drifting into twilit sleep, but did I make it? I saw nothing but blackness everywhere.

Not darkness, even when one wakes in a pitch black room there’s a sense—even if it’s subconscious—of a location, time or an innate feeling that things are there but unseen. When your pupil dilates, it comes to you.

This wasn’t blindness but absolute vacuity, I knew I could see, but there was nothing to see.

Light was derelict. Was it slowed, blocked, had it vanished?

Panic wasn’t within me, but an amalgam of ambiguous emotions: the feeling of awakening when you didn’t realize you fell asleep, the feeling of impending mini-apocalypse as a dreaded appointment neared, the no-man’s-land between déjà vu and jamais vu. As I couldn’t take the world as is nor could I imagine a new ideal, was this a new manifestation of Weltschmerz?

In my mind’s eye, which was unclouded, I saw bubble galaxies imbuing new realities. Was that something I sensed by some latent ESP I’d triggered or was that a dream, a daydream or a nightmare?

I felt weightless which was surreal. It was unearthly yet, as I took a step my movement wasn’t slowed and I touched back down onto solid, indiscernible ground. I was not aloft, nor paralyzed, but benumbed.

Seeing blindly, moving unfeeling; how could this be?

Looking down I saw my legs and hands. Another conundrum: There’s light hitting me and nothing else. What was the source of this light? Is it me?

Impossible. Yet, it seemed to be unless most basic tenets of physics no longer applied.

Continue reading “Flash Showcase: Dissonance by Bernardo Villela” →