Insomniac Trip

I need to document this while the feelings are fresh in my memory. Tonight was the strangest night... I've been on this inexplicable high, maybe it's tied to the temperature (which has dropped for the first time to a level at which I've had to button my overshirt) or to the fact that I overslept for work today (got way too much sleep last night - something like >9 hours!) and have been in this zone ever since... not sure. Not chemically influenced as far as I can tell, unless somebody slipped something into my miso soup. ;)

My breathing has been kinda fast, although my pulse rate has been normal. My whole consciousness has been bouncing back and forth between these giant fleece-covered beachball-like ideas and feelings... Every time I try to come down they buoy me back up, like when somebody throws a quarter into a swimming pool and you try to swim down to grab it, but the pressure builds in your ears and your natural buoyancy fights all of your efforts to get down to the bottom... eventually you give up (or even grab it) and inevitably float back to the top. That's been me tonight. Try as I may, I can't come down.

Went out for a walk in the cool autumn air - was hoping that would calm me down a bit. Instead it was this psychedelic voyage through a reality crafted of light, shadows, whispers, ideas, and feelings. Here are a few snapshots of the evening:

I was walking along a wide brick sidewalk firmly planted upon the earth, but overwhelmed with the feeling that it was only a flimsy veneer held up by a thin framework of structural supports, the entire surface of the earth was all like that, held up on a teetering trelliswork to exactly the height where it would meet my feet.

Walking past a waterfall by the local park, I was struck with the sense that all the stonework and trees around me were immaterial, fuzzy, noncorporeal. The waterfall before me was the only pillar of solidity in the shifting fluidity of the world around me.

The stars above stood out brilliant and solid as nails in the night sky, their coldness and solitude piercing into me like silver threads pulled taut wherever I walked.

The songs in my head... no fewer than three at once. As I listened to them, the window of my auditory perception grew wider and wider, and I could see/hear deeper patterns in the music, and even see how they lined up. I could look/listen to broad swaths of music, like scanning the pages of a book! I toyed for a while with lining up songs (all playing in real-time of course) to synch up certain chords, and then I would let them slide forwards and backwards to line them up by emotional content. As soon as I let a song go with my conscious focus, though, its tempo accelerated until it slipped away. Only by grasping a song and holding it down was I able to listen to it at normal speed.

I saw bicycles parked in the plaza in front of the train station, but they were more than just the physical objects of bicycles. Instead, I was aware of them as mere projections into a 3D space of the 4D paths of their riders. Imagine brilliantly colored lines of neon purple, green, orange, yellow, blue... each streaming out along the roads and up into the hills, one line behind, tracing the entire history of the rider's life, every step, every experience since birth, and one line ahead, shooting into the future, looping back and forth over every daily commute to come, launching off into the unknown places where life will take them. Now picture a spaghetti network of these lines, winding through spacetime, mapping out the lives of all the people of the neighborhood, the city, the prefecture, the country... all the lives of those who came before us, and of those who have yet to be born of couples who haven't even yet met... or maybe they're just friends and have no idea that they'll have children together someday in the future. Now slice a 3D "plane" through this model, like grasping a pile of shoelaces and snipping it off with scissors to look at the cross-section. The points that remain are marked by those bicycles.

As I walked through a wooded area, I had an intense feeling of duality, one face of the reality around me feeling like walking on a sound stage. A dull, muted quality of sound surrounded me, and all light felt like it was being radiated from sources very close to me. The other face of reality felt like I was in a huge, unfathomably enormous cavernous space, every light projected in from infinity, and every object around me, every molecule, was suspended in the middle of that infinite space on a tight, invisible wire. Psychologically it made me feel claustrophobic and agoraphobic at the same time.

Everywhere I walked, I was surrounded by the songs of crickets, and I was acutely aware of their phase differences, the pulsating and beat frequencies of their interference. But on returning home to my apartment block, I was greeted by the most amazing symphony of insects that I've experienced. Certainly the cicadas of summer were outstanding, but in my current perceptual state, I felt like I could hear every individual cricket in the surround-sound amphitheater of the parking lot. Not only could I hear each one, playing its own carefully orchestrated part in the vast symphony, but I could see the sounds streaming by. They left tracks in the background silence, like the star trails you see when the Millenium Falcon jumps into hyperspace, sonic trails that I experienced through a sense I never knew I had, an audiovisual laser show symphonic extravaganza, a musical masterpiece anchored on the 60-cycle hum of the power lines that guided my path home.

I really hope I can fall asleep tonight...