Outside

I don’t know how long I watched myself sleep that night. 

My face looked different than it did in the mirror. I can’t say in what way, it just did. I wondered what I was dreaming about. Probably the usual stuff. I didn’t wonder why I was floating a few feet above my own body. Not for a while at least. I can’t say how long. 

There I was, dreaming, probably about struggling to put on a pair of socks. The socks thing is a surprisingly common motif in my dreams. I never have much trouble putting them on in the waking world. I struggle with a lot of things in the waking world, just not socks.

When I did realize I wasn’t in my body that night, but, instead, hovering like the ghost of a person who just hadn’t died yet, my first thought was about my eyes. They were open. Not fully, but kinda squinting, like I was irritated by something very far off. I knew I did this, but hadn’t ever actually seen it myself. (One time my sister recorded a video of it and showed me, but that’s like a mirror, it doesn’t count.)

“The pool’s closed,” I said, down there in bed. 

Pool’s are not a common motif in my dreams, so I felt a little left out. It was winter at the time, so I knew I didn’t have a chance at going to a pool in real life. And I like pools. More than the ocean, which I can’t explain.

It was the pool thing that made me take my current situation more seriously. If I didn’t have a body, that meant no swimming, no pools, none of it. I needed to figure out how to get back into my body because I needed it. For a lot of things. But especially pools.

I pondered what the rules might be for my current situation. How to get back into my body. Was it something that happened automatically, or did I have to do it myself, before my body-self awoke from his slumber? And if it was the latter, and I didn’t, would I be trapped out here forever? Or, maybe, would I get a second chance the next night? Or, worst of all…could my body even awake without its consciousness? If that’s what this floating part of myself even was.

I tried to move, but that turned out to be a bit of a challenge. Not having a body made it hard to know how to move because, for me, moving has always been directly tied to my physicality. Arms, legs, fingers, etcetera. I would have to do a little more strategizing. 

Then I realized, even though my personal experience of moving is tied directly to my physical body—by that I mean my appendages and their movement—it all starts in my brain. My brain sends signals to my appendages and then my appendages do the thing my brain thought. The thing was, at the moment, I didn’t have a brain. Which seemed like a problem at first, but then I realized I was having thoughts. Thoughts independent of a brain. It made sense when I thought about it (without my brain). So, if my brain was just a conduit of my thoughts—i.e. if thoughts originated outside my physical brain—and my movement was directed by thoughts sent to my brain, which, in turn, sent that movement-thought to my appendages, concluding in my movement, then—when you think about it—thought is what causes movement, not the physical brain.

I thought about moving closer to myself and—therefore—did move closer to myself. 

I didn’t like being that close to my face. There was probably some deep-seated psychological issue to be dealt with regarding that response, but, at the moment, I had to deal with other issues. Mainly, figuring out how to absorb myself back into myself.

Faintly, far off, I could hear the sounds of splashing water. 

I guess the pool’s open now, I thought, completely independently of my brain.

Maybe that was the answer. Maybe I had to synchronize my thoughts with the dream inside my sleeping brain. Sounded as good as anything else. 

I closed my eyes. 

(I didn’t actually close my eyes, I had no eyes to close, but I did my best to focus my attention on my thoughts, instead of my current visual stimulus.)

I listened hard to the sounds coming from my sleeping body’s dream. I tried to imagine the pool, the people sloshing around in the blue, the smell of chlorine, the shape of the splashing waves. 

I imagined I was a bat, hanging there, echolocating my own mind’s unconscious thoughts. And—surprising to even me—it was working. I started to see things, things that I hadn’t imagined, but that began to form by my resonance with the dream venting off into the metaphysical stratosphere.

I stood on the edge of the pool. 

I stood on the diving board.

I stood on the diving board and on the edge of the pool.

The ‘me’ on the edge of the pool was the ‘me’ I had been since I fell asleep. The ‘me’ on the diving board was eleven-years-old and second-guessing his choices. 

I had always loved pools but hated diving boards. This had always caused a tension. As a kid, if you’re in a pool, you have to use the diving board or all the other kids won’t let you live it down. If you tell them that you are afraid of the diving board, they will make sure to get you onto that diving board and then push you off no matter how much you struggle. It’s best to just choose the diving board yourself. 

So this was kinda a nightmare.

I wanted to tell myself that I didn’t need to jump off the diving board, but I knew that wasn’t true. Things had to run their course. A nightmare had to be a nightmare. I didn’t know how dangerous it would be to interfere. I had made it here successfully, inside my own unconscious mind—a feat that seemed impossible, even in the middle of a greater impossibility—so probably best to not push it.

I jumped off the diving board and made the plunge.

I held my breath and waited for myself emerge from the water.

I emerged from the water and swam over to the edge of the pool.

“It’s fine,” I said, spitting out a stream of chlorinated water. “It’s better to just take the dive.”

“I know,” I said.

“What are you doing here?”

“Well, I was outside,” I pointed up, vaguely, “and then…”

“How’d you get out there?”

“No idea.”

“Are you going to stay here?”

“Stay…” I tried to understand what I was saying, “I don’t want to stay, here. I want to go, with you.”

“Where am I going?”

I looked down at my eleven-year-old self and then came the soon-to-be-too-familar sensation…

vision blurs and all goes blank,

steam drifts up from a screaming kettle—

there’s always tomorrow night.